No. 2120

Plovers Roasted a la Martel—Larded

Pluviers Piques Rotis a la Martel

After being drawn, or simply after removing the gizzard, for they are frequently roasted the same as woodcock without drawing, only trussed and larded with fine lardings of pork (No.4, Fig.52); try their intestines with melted fat pork and a few good chicken livers, chopped truffles and cognac to make a preparation the same as described for woodcock canapés (No.2205), and with it cover some oblong crusts. Glaze and heat them at the oven door and serve with the birds on these. Have a separate colbert sauce (No.451) finished with cayenne butter (No.571).

← No. 2119 Plovers Roasted Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2121 Salmis of Yellow—Leg Plovers a la Duclair →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a professional kitchen's roast of a wild shorebird, and the bird itself is the obstacle. The points below explain why the dish cannot be reproduced rather than how to reproduce it.

The bird is protectedPlovers are protected under the U.S. Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918: taking, possessing, selling or serving them is illegal and no commercial source exists. British and EU law differs by species — golden plover, for instance, remains a listed quarry bird in Britain, though sale is restricted. Market shooting of shorebirds for hotel kitchens is exactly what the American legislation was written to stop.
Roasted undrawn, on purposeThe recipe permits leaving the bird's intestines in place, as was standard for woodcock and snipe, then working the "trail" into the canapé spread. Wild bird gut can carry Campylobacter and Salmonella, and while the intestines here are fried with fat pork and livers, the recipe gives no temperature and no timing for either the forcemeat or the brief roast. There is no adjustment that makes an undrawn wild bird a sound proposition in a home kitchen.
A recipe that only works by cross-referenceEvery operative detail lives elsewhere in the book: the larding pattern at No. 4, the woodcock canapé preparation at No. 2205, colbert sauce at No. 451, cayenne butter at No. 571. Read as a standalone page it gives no quantities, no oven heat and no timing at all — it assumes a brigade that already knows the house method.
"Larded with fine lardings of pork"Larding meant threading strips of hard back fat through the flesh with a needle to keep a lean bird from drying. The tool and the fatback are both still obtainable, but the technique has largely been replaced by barding — wrapping in fat or bacon — since larding needles vanished from domestic kitchens.
"Heat them at the oven door"The book asks only that the crusts be glazed and heated at the oven door, which suggests gentler heat than the oven interior — presumably enough to set and gloss them rather than colour them further. A low oven or warming drawer, not a hot one, is the nearest modern equivalent.
If you want the dishThe plate — a rich liver-and-truffle spread on a glazed crust under a small roast bird, with a sharp buttered sauce alongside — is worth reading for its structure. Cook it, if at all, from a current recipe using farmed quail or squab and properly drawn birds.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to a long run of small-bird cookery — quail, snipe, woodcock, reed birds, plovers — that a nineteenth-century American luxury restaurant could take entirely for granted. Shorebirds were shot commercially in enormous numbers on the Atlantic flyway and sold by the dozen in city markets; golden and black-bellied plovers appear on period menus as routinely as squab does now. The signature detail here, roasting undrawn and working the trail into a forcemeat spread on a crust, is the classic French treatment of woodcock, held to concentrate the bird's flavour, and Ranhofer simply extends it to plover. Within a generation that supply chain was gone: the Lacey Act of 1900 curtailed interstate trade in illegally taken game, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended market hunting of shorebirds outright. Pages like this one are among the clearest evidence of what the dining rooms were eating beforehand. The "a la Martel" tag is one of hundreds of such garnish names in the book; like most of them, its origin is not documented.