Important: Safety Warning

This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 2163

Thrushes a la Bianca

Grives a la Bianca

Have as many birds as guests; pick, singe and remove the gizzard, pouch and intestines and fill the inside of each one with Spanish olives stuffed with anchovies, finishing to fill up the empty space with lightly melted fresh butter. Cut as many oval croutons as there are birds, having them three inches long by one and three-quarters wide and halt an inch thick; slit them all around a quarter of an inch high and three-sixteenths of an inch from the edge; take out the inside and place a bird in this hollow; lay them in a sautéing pan the bottom covered with a bed of clarified butter and put it on the hot fire; as soon as the butter is well heated push it into the oven and after the croutons are colored and the thrushes well cooked, take them out and drain them from the butter on a cloth, then range in a circle on a dish and fill the inside with a garnishing made of minced mushrooms and truffles mingled with half-glaze (No. 400), a tablespoonful of good olive oil and the juice of half a lemon; pour this sauce over all and serve.

← No. 2162 Thrushes Andrieux Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2164 Baked Thrushes →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a dish for a bird that can no longer legally be bought, sold or shot in the United States or across most of Europe, and the reasons are legal and ecological rather than culinary.

The bird is protectedThrushes — including the American robin, a thrush — are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the US and by equivalent wild-bird protection law in the EU and UK. Taking, possessing, selling or serving them is an offence, and there is no legal commercial supply.
No substitute is impliedThe recipe depends on a bird small enough to sit whole in a three-inch crouton and cook through in the time the bread takes to color. Nothing in the modern market fills that slot, and scaling the method up to quail changes the cooking entirely. If you want a small-bird dish, work from a current recipe written for a farmed bird.
Why these birds were on menus at allNineteenth-century game dealers sold songbirds by the dozen, netted in autumn migration. That kind of market hunting was among the practices the 1916 treaty and the 1918 act were intended to stop.
The stuffing tells you the scaleThe body cavity takes only a few anchovy-stuffed olives topped up with melted butter, so this is a very small bird; useful context for how many of these were once eaten at a sitting.
Ranhofer's cross-references"Half-glaze (No. 400)" is demi-glace, his reduced brown sauce, and it appears throughout the book rather than being repeated. Reading any Epicurean recipe means chasing two or three numbers elsewhere in the volume.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its game chapters are a frank inventory of what a fashionable American restaurant could buy in the 1880s: canvasback duck, plover, reed birds, and thrushes by the dozen. Eating small migratory birds whole, bones and all, was long established in France and Italy — the ortolan is the notorious survivor of that tradition — and Ranhofer brought the practice with him along with the classical repertoire. The suffix à la Bianca may well follow the common practice of attaching a patron's or performer's name to a garnish, though the book gives no explanation, and a number of his titles seem to honor people whose identities are now lost. The anchovy-stuffed Spanish olive inside each bird and the olive oil finishing the sauce mark this out as one of his Italian-leaning compositions. Within a generation of publication the dish was illegal in the country where it was served, which makes the page a useful marker of how quickly a restaurant staple can become a historical document.