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Roasted Larks
Clean and prepare the larks, tie them up in thin slices of fat bacon and then in vine leaves, and roast in front of a clear fire, basting frequently with butter and turning the spit very rapidly. Serve hot. Lark Scallops on a Croustade Cut the fillets from about fifteen larks; place them in a sautepan with a piece of butter, dust with salt and pepper and fry them. When cooked, drain and let them cool. Slice the same quantity of truffles as there are larks. Reduce some partridge chaurroid sauce with a little essence of larks and mix it with the cooked fillets of larks and the sliced truffles. Prepare a fried bread croustade, put it on a hot dish, arrange the scollops on it in the shape of a pyramid, garnish the dish with croutons of aspic jelly, and serve.
Two linked preparations, both built on a bird that can no longer legally be bought, shot or served in most of the world. The notes below are for reading the text rather than cooking from it.
- The birds are protectedSkylarks, horned larks and their relatives are covered in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which makes possession of the birds, their parts, nests or eggs an offence without a federal permit. Most European jurisdictions likewise protect them under wild bird legislation, with a few narrow and heavily regulated exceptions. There is no lawful retail source; anyone wanting small roast game birds should work from a current recipe for a farmed species.
- Fifteen larks per dishThe second preparation calls for the fillets of about fifteen birds to serve a single croustade. That ratio is worth noticing: it is the arithmetic of a nineteenth-century luxury kitchen buying wild songbirds by the dozen from market game dealers, and that trade added to the pressure on wild bird populations.
- Chaud-froid, not "chaurroid"The printed word is a compositor's mangling of chaud-froid — a velouté or brown sauce enriched and set with aspic, used to coat cold meats with a glossy jacket. "Partridge chaud-froid" means the sauce built on partridge stock.
- Essence of larksAn essence of this kind is a heavily reduced stock made from the carcasses and trimmings of the same bird, used in spoonfuls as a flavour concentrate. Well-equipped kitchens of the period kept such reductions to hand; they are close kin to glace de viande.
- Croustade and croutons of aspicThe croustade is a hollowed case of bread fried in butter, not pastry. The "croutons of aspic" are simply neat cubes or triangles of set jelly cut for garnish — a cold decorative element against the warm dish, and a common garnish in grand-hotel cooking of the period.
- Roasting on a spit before the fireThe first method is true spit roasting: radiant heat from a clear, flameless bed of coals, the bird turned fast so the butter and rendered bacon fat coat rather than run off. It is not an oven technique, and nothing in a domestic oven reproduces it.
- Vine leaves and bardingWrapping small game in fat bacon and then vine leaves is a standard French treatment for small birds. The bacon keeps a lean, thin-skinned bird from drying; the leaf holds the bacon in place and contributes a faint sourness. The same wrapping still appears in recipes for farmed quail.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 compendium reflects the Waldorf's ambition to serve New York exactly what a Parisian grand hotel would serve, and small wild birds were near the top of that list — larks, ortolans, reed birds, plover and snipe all appear on American hotel menus of the 1880s and 1890s, shipped by market hunters who supplied the game trade wholesale. Larks carried a European pedigree: potted lark pies, associated above all with Dunstable in Bedfordshire, were long established, and a lark fillet was regarded as a delicacy precisely because so little meat came off each bird. That commerce is the reason for the recipe and also the reason it is now unusable. Concern at market hunting drove the Lacey Act in 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918, which ended the legal trade in songbirds in the United States within a generation of this book's publication. The page survives as a record of a kitchen that could order fifteen larks for one garnish and think nothing of it.