No. 2084

Larks with Rice

Mauviettes au Riz

Singe, draw and bone about fifteen fine larks; spread them out on the table to season and lay in each one a ball of game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91) mixed with baking forcemeat (No. 81) and a part of their own intestines, cooked, pounded and rubbed through a sieve; form the birds into ball-shapes and sew them up, then lay them in a saucepan with butter or melted fat pork; season and fry quickly for seven or eight minutes while turning them over; now remove them from the pan, leaving in the fat, and into this add two spoonfuls of chopped onions; fry and mix with it three or four spoonfuls of chopped raw ham; fry together for two minutes longer, then put in three gills of good picked rice without previously washing it; heat well while stirring and moisten with a quart of good unskimmed broth (No. 194a). After this has boiled for fifteen minutes, or when the rice begins to soften add the untrussed larks, a pinch of prepared red pepper (No. 168), a garnished bunch of parsley (No. 123) and two spoonfuls of tomato puree (No. 730); cook both rice and larks moderately and finish by incorporating into it a generous piece of butter divided into small pats. Dress in a deep dish and pour over two spoonfuls of half-glaze sauce (No. 413) and tomato sauce (No. 549).

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A risotto-method rice dish built around a bird that no longer exists in commerce. The technique is legible and worth reading; the main ingredient is not obtainable, and the recipe cannot be followed as printed.

The birds are protectedSkylarks and the other small songbirds sold by the dozen in nineteenth-century markets are protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and wild birds are broadly protected across Europe under the Birds Directive, though some member states have permitted limited traditional lark-taking under derogation. They cannot be commercially taken, sold, imported or served, and the dish cannot be assembled from birds bought legally. Farmed quail are the usual stand-in for old small-bird cookery; use a current quail recipe rather than adapting this one.
The intestines are not optional flavouring hereDelmonico's calls for a portion of the birds' own "intestines", the trail, pounded and sieved into the forcemeat. In small game birds the trail was traditionally eaten because the birds were assumed to be shot with an empty gut, an assumption that does not transfer to any bird you can buy. Ranhofer does cook the intestines before sieving them, but viscera from wild-caught birds remains a hygiene question quite apart from the legal one.
Gills and spoonfulsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of rice is a cup and a half, moistened with a quart of broth, a liquid-to-rice ratio in the same general range as a modern risotto, if a little leaner. A "spoonful" in a book of this period is generally taken to mean a tablespoon.
Unskimmed brothNo. 194a is a rich stock with the fat left on. That fat is doing the work a modern cook would do with extra butter or oil, and skimmed stock will give a noticeably leaner, drier rice.
Rice unwashed, on purposeThe rice is fried in the bird fat with onion and raw ham before any liquid goes in, and specifically not rinsed, so the surface starch stays put and thickens the dish. The method is essentially that of a risotto.
"Untrussed"The birds are sewn into balls at the start, then described as untrussed when they go into the rice. The term most likely reflects the French usage for removing the trussing, but the text does not explain the contradiction.
The cross-referencesNothing in the finish can be improvised from this page alone: game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91), baking forcemeat (No. 81), prepared red pepper (No. 168), tomato puree (No. 730), half-glaze (No. 413) and tomato sauce (No. 549) are all separate recipes elsewhere in The Epicurean.

A Little History

Mauviette is the French market name for the skylark taken in autumn, when the birds were netted in large numbers on migration and sold cheaply by the dozen; Ranhofer, who trained in France before running the kitchen at Delmonico's, treats them as an everyday luxury rather than a rarity. Small-bird cookery of this kind — boned, stuffed with a forcemeat enriched by the bird's own trail, then finished in rice or a pastry crust — belongs to a period when songbirds were legitimate provisions on both sides of the Atlantic, and the market ended not through changing taste but through law. The American Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed the trade within a generation of this book's publication in 1894, which is why a recipe an 1890s chef considered routine now reads as a historical document.