No. 2082

Larks Broiled

Alouettes Grillees

Take the larks well cleaned and picked, split them lengthways through the back, season and broil; three to five minutes suffice to cook them. Dress on canapés made of toasted oblongs of bread-crumbs, cover with game fumet (No. 397) made with quail and espagnole sauce (No. 414) that has been liberally buttered, then serve.

← No. 2081 Larks a la Marechale Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2083 Larks, Perigueux Sauce—Roasted →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a legal problem before it is a cooking problem: the bird itself is off the table in most of the world today. The notes below explain the obstacle and decode Ranhofer's shorthand for readers working through The Epicurean.

The bird is protectedLarks — skylark, horned lark and their relatives — are protected songbirds. In the United States they fall under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes it unlawful to take, possess, sell or serve them. In the European Union the Birds Directive protects wild birds generally, though the skylark is listed as huntable in a handful of member states, France among them, under regulated seasons. For practical purposes there is no legal commercial supply of larks for the kitchen in the United States.
No commercial source existsNineteenth-century American markets sold wild songbirds by the dozen, which is why Ranhofer treats them as an ordinary purchase. That trade was shut down precisely because market gunning collapsed the populations.
If you want the dishUse a current recipe written for farmed quail, which is legally raised and sold and is what the accompanying fumet in this very recipe is built on. Do not adapt these instructions to a wild bird you have shot yourself.
What the cross-references areNo. 397 is a game fumet, a concentrated reduction of game bones and trimmings; No. 414 is espagnole, the brown mother sauce of the period, built on a roux and brown veal stock. Ranhofer expects both to be standing ready in a professional kitchen, and the recipe is unfinishable without them.
"Canapés" hereNot a cocktail nibble. In Ranhofer's usage a canapé is a shaped slice of bread, fried or toasted, used as a plinth to hold a small roast and catch its juices. "Toasted oblongs of bread-crumbs" most likely means oblongs cut from the crumb of the loaf — the soft interior, crusts removed — and toasted.
"Liberally buttered" sauceThis most likely indicates finishing with butter, what is now called monter au beurre — cold butter whisked into the sauce off the heat, for gloss and body. A sauce finished this way should not be boiled again or it will break.

A Little History

Larks were standard restaurant game in Ranhofer's Delmonico's, and The Epicurean (1894) devotes a run of numbered recipes to them alongside quail, snipe and woodcock — broiled, roasted, en caisse, in pies. European cookery had eaten small birds for centuries, from the Italian polenta e osei to the French alouettes sans tête (a beef roll named for the shape of the birds it imitates rather than a bird dish at all), and American markets in the 1870s and 1880s supplied wild songbirds in quantity to hotels and clubs. The market-hunting of small birds was among the practices the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 were written to end. The recipe survives, then, as a document of a food supply that was deliberately dismantled inside a generation of its printing.