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Larks in Cases
Pluck, singe, draw, and bone the larks; stuff each bird with a mixture composed of three parts minced white flesh of cooked chicken and one part ham and raw bacon seasoned with chopped sage, salt and pepper, and a small quantity of pounded mace. Butter as many paper cases as there are birds, spread a layer of the same forcemeat in each, place the birds in the cases, place a slice of bacon over each, and bake in a moderate oven. When it is cooked remove the bacon, pour a small quantity of rich gravy and a few drops of lemon juice in each case, stand them on a hot dish over which has been placed a fancy-edged dish-paper, garnish with parsley and cut lemons, and serve.
The obstacle here is not technique but the bird itself. Skylarks and the other small songbirds sold by the dozen in nineteenth-century markets are protected wildlife across Europe and North America, and the dish cannot lawfully be reproduced.
- The birds are protectedLarks are songbirds covered in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it an offence to take, kill, possess or sell them or their parts. The UK protects wild birds under its own wild bird legislation, and EU law protects them under the Birds Directive, though a few member states have permitted limited hunting or trapping of skylarks under derogations. There is no ordinary commercial food supply.
- Wild-caught small birds are not inspectedEven where trapping of some species persists, birds taken from the wild pass through no inspection regime. Plucking, singeing and drawing a wild passerine in a domestic kitchen carries a pathogen load that commercial poultry handling is designed to control.
- Not a matter of substitutionThe recipe depends on a boned bird a few inches long that cooks through in the time a rasher of bacon takes to render. Quail is often offered as the nearest legal equivalent, but the scale, bone structure and cooking time are all different, and a current recipe written for quail should be used rather than this one adapted.
- Why the forcemeat is thereWorth noting for reading purposes: the chicken, ham and bacon stuffing is not decoration. A boned lark is mostly breast, and the forcemeat plausibly gave the case bulk and fat. Apart from the buttered case, the bacon slice on top was the bird's only covering of fat in the oven.
- Paper casesThe cases are the small pleated paper or foil cups still sold for baked entrees, buttered so they will not stick and set directly on the dish for service. Oscar's "fancy-edged dish-paper" is the doily beneath them.
- A moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate' is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. For birds of this size the baking would have been short rather than the long roast the phrase suggests to a modern ear.
Small birds cooked whole in pastry cases run through European cookery from the medieval period onward, with paper cases a later development, and by the nineteenth century larks in particular were a market commodity: netted in enormous numbers on migration, sold by the dozen, and served as a savoury course or a supper dish in hotels and clubs. Oscar Tschirky's book, drawn from the Waldorf's kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, records the repertoire of a grand American hotel that took its cues from Paris and London, where lark pie and larks in cases were unremarkable menu items. The disappearance of the dish is a straightforward matter of law and population: sustained commercial trapping of songbirds pushed several species into decline, and the treaties and statutes of the early twentieth century - the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 among them - ended the Anglo-American market, though lark hunting has continued legally in parts of southern Europe. Pages like this one now read less as instruction than as a record of what a hotel larder held before that shift.