No. 2312

Reedbird Patty—Large, Hot

Gros Pate Chaud de Mauviettes

Butter a hot pie mold (Fig. 153) and line it with pie paste (No. 145). Bone the breasts of about thirty reed-birds; fill them with game forcemeat (No. 91) and an equal quantity of foiesgras mixed together, having some chopped truffles added. Heat some melted fat pork in a sautoir; when very hot range the birds on it simply to stiffen them, season and let get cold. Fill the mold with the reedbirds and game forcemeat (No. 91), alternating one and the other and intermingling in slices of raw truffles; have it dome-shaped, then cover with thin slices of fat pork and this with a flat of the same paste, fastening the edges together; cut a small hole in the center, decorate it, egg over, and cook the pie for an hour and a quarter in a moderate oven; after it has been ten minutes from the fire, take off the mold and open and suppress the pork. Pour in a few spoonfuls of brown sauce reduced with a fumet (No. 397), and mix with it a little Madeira; put back the cover and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a showpiece raised pie from Delmonico's kitchen, and its central ingredient is now illegal to buy, sell, or kill in the United States. The points below explain what stands in the way rather than how to work around it.

Reedbird means bobolink"Mauviette" properly means lark in French, and was extended in nineteenth-century kitchen usage to other small birds; on American menus "reedbird" almost always meant the bobolink, netted in quantity in the tidal reed marshes of the Delaware and Chesapeake. The bobolink is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and taking, possessing, or selling one is a federal offense. There is no legal source for thirty of them.
No lawful substitute is impliedFarmed quail or squab are sold legally, but a pie built for thirty boned songbird breasts is not a recipe that transfers by swapping the bird. If you want a hot raised game pie, work from a current recipe written for the bird you can actually buy.
Ortolan and its relativesEuropean cooks reading this may think of ortolan, likewise a small bunting eaten whole and likewise protected — commerce in it has been banned in France since the 1990s and enforcement tightened thereafter. The whole genre of songbird cookery in The Epicurean is closed.
Foie gras is regionally restrictedSeparate from the bird question, force-fed foie gras is banned from sale in some jurisdictions, California among them. Check local law before sourcing the forcemeat.
The cross-references are load-bearingThe recipe is unbuildable as printed in any case: paste No. 145, game forcemeat No. 91, and the fumet of No. 397 all live elsewhere in the book, and the "hot pie mold" of Fig. 153 is a hinged raised-pie mold, not a pie dish.
Read it as a documentThe construction is worth studying — birds and forcemeat layered in alternating courses, raw truffle sliced between, a fat-pork cap that is lifted out and discarded after baking, the pie opened and sauce poured in before the cover goes back on. Those are live techniques even where the ingredient list is not.

A Little History

Reedbirds were a genuine seasonal commodity in the Atlantic states: in late summer bobolinks fattened on wild rice and marsh seed, and market gunners and netters supplied them to city dealers in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, cheap enough to be a common market bird and grand enough for Delmonico's. Charles Ranhofer, who ran that kitchen for more than thirty years, treats them here in the full French pâté chaud manner — a hinged mold lined with paste, layered with game forcemeat and foie gras, the pie opened and sauced just before serving — and files further reedbird preparations elsewhere in the book, which tells you how ordinary the bird then was. That abundance is precisely what ended it. Market hunting of songbirds collapsed their numbers, state laws began closing the trade around the turn of the century, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 shut it for good. The recipe now reads as a record of a food supply that the law deliberately abolished.