No. 2051

Doe Birds Roasted and Broiled

Courlis Rotis et Grilles

Small doe birds are the size of a large plover, having a long bent beak. It is a delicate game being slightly analagous to the plover; let set till tender then pick, singe and suppress the gizzard and crop without emptying out the insides. Truss them bent under like the plovers (No. 2119) bard over with very thin slices of fat pork and cook either on the spit or in the oven, or else broil; serve on canapés with clear gravy (No. 404) separate. Doe birds can be prepared in several ways, proceeding exactly the same as for the plovers.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a recipe for a bird that can no longer be taken, sold or served. The notes below explain what it is and why the page belongs in a reading room rather than a kitchen.

What a "doe bird" isThe French heading Courlis and the description of a plover-sized bird with a long bent beak identify the Eskimo curlew, Numenius borealis, known to nineteenth-century market hunters as the doe bird or dough bird. The name is generally explained by the thick layer of fat the birds carried on migration.
The species is protected and almost certainly goneEskimo curlew were shot in large numbers for the market in the second half of the nineteenth century and collapsed within a generation. The last confirmed records date from the early 1960s; the bird is listed as critically endangered and is widely presumed extinct. Curlews are protected under migratory bird law in the United States and Canada, and killing, possessing or serving one is an offence — though some related shorebirds, such as Wilson's snipe and American woodcock, remain legal game with regulated seasons.
No substitute is being offeredThe recipe as written cannot be carried out with any legal bird without changing what the dish is. Anyone wanting roast game birds today should work from a current recipe for farmed quail or squab rather than adapting this one.
"Let set till tender"This means hanging the bird in feather in a cool place until the flesh softens, the usual European treatment for game of this period. It takes the bird well past what a modern kitchen would accept, and it is not a step to reproduce.
Cooked undrawnSmall game birds of this type were commonly roasted with the intestines left in, only the gizzard and crop removed; here they are served on canapés, though Ranhofer does not say what becomes of the trail. Combined with hanging, this is the specific practice that puts the dish outside present-day food safety.
Terms in the textTo bard is to tie thin sheets of pork fat over the breast so a lean bird does not dry out. Canapés here are fried or toasted bread trenchers set under the birds, not cocktail snacks. Singe means to burn off the remaining down over a flame after plucking.
The cross-referencesNo. 2119 is the plover entry, cited here for the trussing ("bent under like the plovers"); No. 404 is Ranhofer's clear gravy, which the text directs be served separate, that is alongside rather than poured over.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and its game chapters record what a first-class American restaurant could actually buy in that era: plover, snipe, woodcock, blackhead duck and curlew arriving from market gunners on the Atlantic flyway and the prairies. The doe bird appears here as one item among dozens, treated almost casually, with the instruction to proceed "exactly the same as for the plovers" — the mark of an ingredient so ordinary it needed no special handling. Within twenty years of publication the Eskimo curlew had all but vanished, and the market-hunting trade that had supplied kitchens like his was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913 and then by the migratory bird convention signed with Great Britain, for Canada, in 1916 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The entry is worth reading precisely for that: a short, unsentimental paragraph showing how abundant a bird was, written just as the abundance ended.