No. 2119

Plovers Roasted

Pluviers Rotis

Singe and draw half a dozen of either golden or grass plovers. With their intestines and some grated fat pork make a dressing seasoned with salt, pepper, parsley and finely chopped shallot fried in butter; fill the insides of the birds, bard them over tying on the pork. Turn the feet and maintain them by passing one through the other; run the under part of the throat on the leg to keep it in this position; thrust a skewer through, fastening it on the spit, and when cooked remove, untruss and dress on top of croutons (No.51), pour over some good gravy into which mix game glaze (No.398); surround with water-cress seasoned with vinegar and salt.

← No. 2118 Plovers Broiled Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2120 Plovers Roasted a la Martel—Larded →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a spit-roasting method from a professional nineteenth-century kitchen, written for a bird that can no longer legally be brought to the table in most of the world. The obstacles here are legal and biological rather than culinary.

The bird is protectedGolden plover and the various "grass plovers" (the American term generally covered the upland sandpiper and related shorebirds) are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in the United States and Canada, where killing, possessing or selling them is an offence. In Europe the position varies by country: the European golden plover is still a quarry species with an open season in the UK and Ireland, but the sale of the dead birds is prohibited, so there is no legal commercial supply.
Why they vanished from the marketShorebirds were shot commercially in enormous numbers through the 1880s and 1890s precisely because kitchens like this one bought them. The Eskimo curlew, sold and cooked alongside plovers, was hunted to functional extinction within a generation.
The intestines in the stuffingPlovers, snipe and woodcock were traditionally cooked undrawn or with the "trail" used as the forcemeat, on the reasoning that these birds void themselves cleanly. That reasoning does not hold for wild-caught birds generally, and the trail is worked into a dressing here without any stated cooking temperature of its own.
No temperature, no timeRanhofer assumes a spit before an open fire and a cook who judges by eye. Nothing in the text tells you how hot, how long, or to what internal doneness the stuffed birds are taken, and small wild birds of this kind were often served rare.
Barding pork"Bard them over tying on the pork" means wrapping the breast in thin sheets of back fat and tying it in place, the standard protection for a lean bird over dry heat. The sheet fat sold for this is now usually called fatback or barding fat and comes from a butcher rather than a supermarket case.
If you want the dishFarmed quail and squab are the legal small birds, and a current recipe written for them should be used.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked during more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its game chapters are a straightforward inventory of what the market gunners were bringing into the city. Plovers appear often enough to be given numbered variations — broiled, roasted, larded, a la Martel. The accompaniments here are the classic ones for small game: a crouton beneath to catch the juices, a gravy sharpened with game glaze, and a bundle of watercress dressed with vinegar and salt for bite. Within a few years of the book's publication the trade that supplied it was being dismantled: the Lacey Act of 1900 attacked interstate commerce in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed the market on shorebirds altogether. Recipes like this one survive as the fullest evidence of how much was being eaten, and how quickly it went.