No. 2083

Larks, Perigueux Sauce—Roasted

Alouettes Roties Sauce Perigueux

Roast without drawing, only removing the gizzard, singe and cover with very thin bards of fat pork and run a metal skewer through four of them, keeping them slightly apart so that the heat can penetrate between each one. They only require to be cooked from five to six minutes, then dress them on croutons of bread covered with liver forcemeat; remove the larding and pour over a Perigueux sauce with Madeira (No. 517).

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Delmonico's recipe for a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold, or shot in the United States or the European Union. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish is closed to us.

The bird itselfNative larks and the small songbirds of the kind Ranhofer's kitchen used are protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and songbirds are broadly protected across Europe under the Birds Directive, though some member states have allowed traditional lark-catching under derogations. There is no lawful commercial supply of them for the table.
Roasted undrawnThe instruction to cook "without drawing, only removing the gizzard" leaves the intestines in the body cavity — the older European practice with small game birds, on the argument that the trail is part of the flavour. Five to six minutes over high heat cannot bring viscera to a safe temperature, and gut contents are exactly where enteric bacteria live.
If you want the dishFarmed quail is the legal small bird sold in the United States and is what a current recipe will call for. Use such a recipe rather than adapting this one.
Bards"Very thin bards of fat pork" are sheets of fatback cut wide and shaved thin, tied or pinned over the breast so the lean meat does not dry out. "Remove the larding" at the end simply means to strip the barding off before saucing.
Perigueux sauceRanhofer's No. 517: a brown sauce, essentially demi-glace, finished with chopped truffle and Madeira. It is named for Périgueux in the Dordogne, in the Périgord country associated with the French black truffle, and it is the reason the dish reads as expensive.
Liver forcemeat croutonsThe croutons are fried bread spread with a seasoned liver farce — the bird sits on it so the juices are caught rather than lost. The same construction survives in modern presentations of squab and quail.
The skewerFour birds run onto one metal skewer and kept deliberately apart, so that, as the recipe says, the heat can penetrate between each one.

A Little History

Small songbirds were standard luxury eating in nineteenth-century Europe and, by extension, in the grand American restaurants that copied Europe. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, gives larks a run of recipes in The Epicurean (1894) — broiled, roasted, with rice — and a plate of tiny birds on truffled sauce announced a kitchen that could afford them. The trade fell away within a generation: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and later European protections ended the commercial killing of songbirds, and what survives of the tradition is the illegal French taste for ortolan. The recipe is worth reading as a record of how Gilded Age menus were built, and of a technique — barding, spacing on the skewer, catching the juices on a liver-spread crouton — that carried over onto quail and squab once the larks were gone.