Reed Birds
Roasting by suspending on the little wire which accompanies the roaster, is the best method; turn and baste frequently, or wash and peel with as thin a paring as possible large potatoes of equal size, cut a deep slice off one end of each, and scoop out a part of the potato; drop a piece of butter into each bird, pepper and salt, and put it in the hollows made in the potatoes; put on as covers the pieces cut off, and clip the other end for them to stand on. Set in a baking pan upright, with a little water to prevent burning, bake slowly, and serve in the dish in which they were baked.
Or, boil in a crust like dumplings.
This is a recipe for a bird that cannot legally be taken, bought or cooked in the United States. The points below explain what the ingredient was and why the page is now a historical document rather than a set of instructions.
- What a reed bird was"Reed bird" was the market name for the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), shot in enormous numbers in the rice fields and reed marshes of the South Atlantic coast during autumn migration, when the birds were fat. The same trade also sold them as "rice birds" and "ortolans."
- Protected speciesBobolinks are songbirds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its implementing regulations. Killing, possessing, buying, selling or serving them is a federal offense, and no hunting season exists for them. The market hunting that supplied this recipe is precisely what the treaty was written to end.
- Other small birds are not a loopholeAlmost every native small wild bird a cook might reach for instead — native sparrows, larks, thrushes, robins — is likewise protected. Nor can the recipe be filled with imported ortolan, whose hunting is banned in the European Union and which cannot legally be imported.
- If you want the dishFarmed quail is the legal bird of comparable size sold in the United States. Use a current quail recipe with its own times and temperatures rather than adapting the instructions above.
- Reading the methodThe potato-shell trick — hollowing a large potato, seating the bird inside with butter, capping it with the cut end and standing it upright in a little water — is a sealed-vessel roast, the potato acting as both cooking pot and side dish. The book gives no temperature for "bake slowly." The alternative, "boil in a crust like dumplings," appears to mean enclosing each bird in a paste and simmering it.
- The wire roasterThe "little wire which accompanies the roaster" implies a roaster fitted with a wire from which small birds could be hung and turned by hand, which is why the original insists on frequent turning and basting.
Bobolinks were a genuine article of Southern commerce in the nineteenth century, hated by rice planters whose crops they stripped on migration and sold by the dozen in Charleston and Savannah markets as "rice birds" or "reed birds"; northern cities knew them in autumn as a delicacy on hotel menus, often billed with the borrowed French name ortolan. Their appearance in the game chapter of a late-century compilation like The Dixie Cook Book reflects a period when a game list ran to anything with feathers — plover, snipe, robins, larks, blackbirds — and small songbirds were priced by the dozen rather than the bird. The trade collapsed within a generation of this book's publication, first under state laws and then decisively under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which is generally credited with saving several of the species that once filled such chapters.