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Lark Soup
Boil ten ounces of washed rice in broth till reduced to a puree, adding now and then a little more broth to keep it thin. Singe, draw and clean two dozen larks, fry them in a stewpan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, allow them to cool, then remove their fillets, and trim neatly. With the bones and trimmings of the larks prepare a little stock. When made, pass it through a fine hair sieve into the rice puree. Place the fillets in the soup, warm them up again, and then pour all into a hot dish. Add one pinch of chopped green mint, and the juice of two oranges and serve.
This is a period restaurant soup built on a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold or taken in the United States or most of Europe. The notes below explain the obstacle and decode the older kitchen language.
- The larks are the problemSkylarks and their relatives are songbirds protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and in Europe under the EU Birds Directive and equivalent national law. Sale is prohibited and there is no legal commercial supply, though a few countries have retained limited traditional trapping derogations. If you want a game-bird consomm ecipe written around farmed poultry.
- "Singe, draw and clean"Standard nineteenth-century instructions for a small bird: singe off the remaining down and hairs over a flame after plucking, remove the entrails, wipe out the cavity. It assumes birds arriving whole.
- Fillets from a larkA lark weighs only an ounce or two, so the two breast fillets are very small; two dozen birds might yield only a few ounces of meat in total. The labour, not the substance, is the point of the dish.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the fine strainer of the period. A modern fine-mesh conical strainer, or a chinois lined with muslin, is its direct descendant.
- Ten ounces of riceWeight, not volume — roughly 1 1/2 cups of raw long-grain rice, cooked far past done in broth until it breaks down into a starchy purée. The rice supplies the body of the soup rather than remaining as visible grains.
- Mint and orangeThe finish is the notable part of the page: chopped green mint and the juice of two oranges over a savoury purée, which recalls the older European habit of sharpening small-game dishes with fruit acid and a fresh herb rather than cream.
Small songbirds were ordinary luxury food in Europe well into the twentieth century — larks, thrushes and ortolans were netted in autumn and sold in markets from Naples to Paris, and French and Italian cookery books of the 1800s treat lark as unremarkably as we treat quail. Dishes of this kind belonged to the Franco-continental repertoire served in grand hotel kitchens of the period, and imported or domestically netted small birds were still on American menus at the time. What ended the trade was not taste but law: the market-hunting collapse of North American bird populations led to the Lacey Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, while European nations progressively banned songbird netting through the twentieth century. The recipe survives as a record of a kitchen economy in which two dozen birds could be broken down for a few ounces of fillet.