Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Roasted Reedbirds
Roasted Reedbirds
Procure a dozen freshly killed, fine, fat reedbirds, cut off their legs and wings, pick the eyes out, remove the skin from the heads, clean and wipe them neatly and with a skewer remove the gizzards from the sides; then cover their breasts lightly with thin slices of bacon, arrange them on three small skewers, four on each one, and place them in a roastingpan; season with a pinch of salt, spread over a very little butter, and stand them in the oven to roast for seven minutes. Place them on a hot dish on pieces of toast, and serve at once.
This dish cannot be prepared today, and the obstacle is the bird itself rather than the technique.
- What a reedbird was"Reedbird" was the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), a small migratory songbird shot in enormous numbers in the reed marshes and rice fields of the Atlantic seaboard in late summer, when the birds were fat from feeding. Restaurant menus of the 1890s also sold them as ricebirds.
- Now a protected speciesThe bobolink is a migratory songbird protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and in Canada under the Migratory Birds Convention Act. Killing, possessing, buying, selling or serving one is a federal offence, and there is no lawful market source. That alone puts this recipe out of reach.
- No legal supply existsUnlike quail or squab, reedbirds were never farmed; the entire trade depended on wild-caught birds sold by the dozen to hotel kitchens. When the market was closed, the ingredient simply vanished from commerce.
- Why the ban happenedCommercial gunning for the table, of which this recipe is a direct expression, contributed to declines in bobolinks and other small migrants through the late nineteenth century. Populations remain in long-term decline today, largely from loss of grassland breeding habitat.
- The instructions are incomplete anywayNo oven temperature is given, and seven minutes for a small bird implies a very hot oven. The printed text supplies no guidance on the point.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe written for farmed quail or squab from a licensed supplier. Nothing here should be read as a method for cooking wild songbirds.
Reedbirds belong to a vanished category of American luxury: the tiny wild bird eaten whole, bones and all, on a square of toast that caught the juices. Bobolinks were netted and shot by the thousand in the marshes of New Jersey, Maryland and the Carolinas during the autumn migration, shipped iced to city markets, and sold cheaply by the dozen; hotels like the Waldorf then turned them into an expensive course. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, records the era at its peak, when a menu could offer reedbirds, canvasback duck and terrapin as a matter of course. The Lacey Act of 1900 restricted interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the songbird trade outright, which is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now reads as a historical document rather than a set of directions.