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Roasted Ortolans
Pluck and singe one dozen ortolans, make a hole in the sides and remove the gizzards, but do not draw them. Stuff the heads into the holes, wrap them round with thin slices of fat bacon and put them in the oven to roast. Let them remain for ten or twelve minutes, sprinkle over with salt, arrange them on a dish on croutons of fried bread, and serve. They may be wrapped in vine leaves (freshly gathered) if preferred instead of the bacon, which destroys the delicate flavor to a certain extent. A rich sauce should be served with them.
This dish cannot be made today, and the reason is the bird itself rather than the technique. The points below explain the specific obstacles.
- The bird is protectedThe ortolan is a bunting (Emberiza hortulana), a small migratory songbird. It is protected across Europe under the EU Birds Directive, and hunting, trapping, sale and serving of it have been banned in France since 1999, with enforcement tightened in the years since. Populations have fallen sharply, which is why the ban exists.
- No legal supply anywhereThere is no farmed or licensed source. In the United States, native buntings and nearly all wild songbirds are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so no American equivalent can lawfully be taken or sold for the table.
- Undrawn game at ten minutesThe recipe deliberately leaves the intestines in place, and ten to twelve minutes in a hot oven will not bring the interior of a bird's gut to a temperature that addresses Salmonella or Campylobacter.
- Wrapping in leavesThe vine-leaf variant assumes freshly gathered, unsprayed leaves. Vine leaves from a modern vineyard or garden may carry fungicide and insecticide residues not intended for direct food contact.
- What to cook insteadIf you want the shape of the dish, look up a current recipe for farmed quail on fried croutons. Quail are drawn, sold legally and roast in a similar time. Do not adapt the instructions above.
Ortolans were the high-water mark of nineteenth-century luxury cookery, trapped on their autumn migration through southwestern France, fattened in darkened cages on millet, then killed and cooked whole and eaten in a single mouthful, bones and all — a ritual often said to have been performed under a napkin, though the origin of that custom is more folklore than record. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 reflects a New York hotel trade in such delicacies, alongside terrapin, canvasback duck and reed birds; Delmonico's and the Waldorf competed partly on which rarities they could put on a plate. The recipe survives here as evidence of an era before wildlife protection law, when small migratory birds were an ordinary market commodity. Ortolan numbers collapsed in the twentieth century, and the dish is now remembered chiefly through the legal fights over illicit servings in France.