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. 2247

Crepine of Reedbirds

Crepine de Mauviettes

Take one dozen well cleaned and boned reedbirds, remove the breasts and put the leg meats and intestines into a sautoir, fry them in butter with some truffle parings and let get cold; season with salt and pepper, pound to a pulp and press through a sieve; mix in with this as much game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91), and later add an equal quantity of fine herbs. Pare the breasts, remove the skin without extracting the minion fillets, season and cover both sides with a part of the forcemeat. Have some fresh and well soaked "crepine" or caul fat; remove the fattest parts with a knife and wrap the breasts in, dip them once in butter, then in bread-crumbs, smoothing this nicely with the blade of a knife, fry in clarified butter, drain and dress in a circle with a bread crouton between each of the breasts. Fry some chopped mushroom, shallot and parsley, moisten with a little white wine and good stock; reduce the stock, add to it a little meat glaze (No. 402) and parsley and finish with a piece of fresh butter; cover the crepines with this and serve at once.

← No. 2246 Crepine of Pigeons, Poivrade Sauce with Truf Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2248 Crepine and Sausages of Venison →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

The technique here — boned breasts jacketed in forcemeat, wrapped in caul, crumbed and fried — is sound classical work, but the bird itself puts this recipe out of reach in the United States and much of Europe.

The birds are protected"Mauviettes" in Ranhofer's American kitchen meant bobolinks, marketed as reedbirds and shot in quantity in the Delaware and Chesapeake marshes. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the hunting, sale and possession of them without federal permit, and the same protection covers the other small native passerines of this chapter; the European ortolan is protected under European law. There is no lawful way to obtain a dozen reedbirds.
The intestines are part of the dishSmall game birds were cooked undrawn, the "trail" being prized for flavour. Here the intestines go into the sautoir with the leg meat and are pounded into the farce. Whole gut from any bird, cooked only to a brief fry and then chilled before pounding, is not handled in a way current practice would accept.
Use a current recipeIf you want the crepinette method, work from a modern recipe written for a farmed bird. Nothing in this entry should be scaled onto quail or squab by guesswork; the quantities, the trail and the whole-bird boning all assume a very small bird.
CrepineCaul fat, the lacy fat membrane from around a pig's stomach. It is still sold by good butchers, needs soaking in tepid water to unfold without tearing, and self-bastes then melts away in the pan. This is what the recipe means by removing "the fattest parts" — the thick veins are trimmed so the lace lies flat.
SautoirA shallow, straight-sided frying pan, close to what is now sold as a sauté pan. It is stovetop, not oven, cookware.
Minion filletsThe filets mignons of a bird — the small tenderloin strips lying under each breast. The instruction is to peel the skin off without pulling the loose fillet away with it.
Cross-referencesNo. 91 is Ranhofer's game quenelle forcemeat; No. 402 is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup. Neither is reproduced here, and both are indispensable to the recipe as written.

A Little History

Reedbirds were bobolinks, netted and shot in enormous numbers on their autumn migration through the tidal rice and wild-oat marshes of the mid-Atlantic, where they fattened to the point that market men sold them by the dozen as a delicacy. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's for much of the period between 1862 and 1896, served them, and The Epicurean (1894) treats them as a staple of the miscellaneous entr"e chapter alongside larks and ortolans, French names attached to American birds for the benefit of a New York clientele that wanted Paris on the plate. The trade was one of the clearest examples of what market hunting could do to an abundant species, and it is precisely the kind of commerce the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was written to stop. The recipe survives chiefly as evidence of a vanished table: a dozen songbirds boned, their breasts padded with truffle-scented farce and fried in caul, for a single course among many.