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Ortolan Patties
Make six patties of tart paste in fluted moulds made with hinges so that they will open to let out the patty crusts when done; fill them with flour and bake. When set take them out of the moulds and let them get cold. Place at the bottom of each one tablespoonful of royal salpicon, and then place in each patty two well picked, fine, fat, raw, seasoned ortolans, covered with a thin slice of bacon; lay them on a small baking pan, place in a moderate oven and bake for fifteen minutes. Remove from the oven, take off the lard from the birds, moisten each patty with two tablespoonfuls of hot Madeira sauce, and serve on a hot dish with a folded napkin placed over it. Ortolans, Perigordine Prepare the birds as for roasting, cover them with slices of fat bacon, put them in a saucepan, set in the bain-marie, add a little stock mixed with lemon juice, baste them with this, and cook them. Scoop out the center from as many truffles as there are birds, put them into a saucepan with sufficient champagne to boil them in, take them out when done and stuff with a little game puree. Put them into the saucepan with the ortolans, warm them all up for a few seconds, arrange them on a dish, and serve with a little of the sauce to moisten them.
Ortolans, Provincial Style Procure as many large truffles as there are birds to be cooked and make some French forcemeat. Remove the feet and heads from the birds and season well with salt and pepper; lay the birds on their backs on the truffles, put them in a deep stewpan with two gills of red wine and about the same quantity of clear veal stock and cover with slices of bacon; cover and stew slowly. When they are cooked remove the birds and truffles and keep them hot; strain the sauce through a fine sieve, skim off all the fat, pour it into a small, clean stewpan and boil till reduced to half its original quantity. Mix with the sauce one breakfast cupful of brown Spanish sauce and boil it again until somewhat reduced. Put some pieces of toast on a hot dish, pour the sauce over, put the birds and truffles on them, and serve.
This is a set of three ortolan preparations from the Waldorf's kitchen, and the central ingredient is the reason the page can only be read rather than cooked. What follows explains the obstacle and glosses the vocabulary.
- The bird is protectedThe ortolan (Emberiza hortulana), or ortolan bunting, is a small migratory songbird whose capture, sale and consumption are prohibited across the European Union, and it cannot legally be imported into the United States. The trade the recipe assumes — wild-caught birds sold by the dozen to hotel kitchens — no longer exists lawfully anywhere. If you want a small game bird on toast with truffle and Madeira, use a current recipe written for quail.
- Why they were eaten wholeThe recipe calls for birds "well picked" but says nothing about drawing them: ortolans were traditionally cooked and eaten entire, bones and viscera included, which is part of why the practice drew both its reputation and its eventual ban. Nothing in these instructions is transferable to a bird you would clean conventionally.
- Salpicon and forcemeatA royal salpicon is a fine dice of luxury ingredients — typically truffle, foie gras, mushroom and the like — bound in a reduced sauce. French forcemeat here means a veal or game panada forcemeat, not sausage meat.
- Brown Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on a dark roux, brown stock and mirepoix, reduced over hours. A "breakfast cupful" is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; the term was never standardised.
- Gills and other unitsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of red wine is one cup. "A moderate oven" is conventionally read today as roughly 350F, though the book itself gives no temperatures.
- The lard is baconWhen the first recipe says to "take off the lard from the birds," it means the barding slice of fat bacon laid over them, not rendered pork fat. Bain-marie is a water bath, used here to hold a gentle heat rather than to bake.
- The flour-filled crustsFilling the pastry shells with dry flour is simply blind baking by an older method, the weight holding the walls up in the hinged mould. Modern practice substitutes ceramic beans or dried pulses.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the top of the Gilded Age hotel repertoire, and ortolans sat at its apex: tiny buntings netted on migration through southwestern France, fattened in darkness, and shipped to luxury kitchens where their scarcity and price were the point. The three treatments here are straight out of the French grande cuisine that the Waldorf imported wholesale — Perigordine signals truffles from the Perigord, and the "Provincial" version with red wine and espagnole is a standard braise dressed up with a truffle under each bird. Ortolans are often said to have been eaten under a napkin, though the explanations given for the custom — to hold the aroma, or to hide the diner from God — are traditional rather than documented; the folded napkin laid over the serving dish in the first recipe is ordinary service practice and need not be connected to it. Populations collapsed through the twentieth century, France banned the hunt in 1999 under European bird protection law, and the dish passed from menu to museum piece over the century following this book's publication.