No. 2317

Plover Pie—Large, Hot

Gros Pate Chaud de Pluviers

Make a hot pie crust the same as for Bontoux (No. 2314). Bone one dozen plovers or more according to the size of pie; stuff them with game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91), into which incorporate one-eighth of an inch squares of truffles and range them in a sautoir one beside the other; moisten with a little mirepoix stock (No. 419) prepared with white wine and cook on a moderate fire until done; then lay them in another sautoir with espagnole sauce (No. 414) reduced with game fumet (No. 397), and a garnishing of mushroom heads and medium-sized peeled truffles; when all the ingredients are very hot fill the hot pie crust and serve.

← No. 2316 Fat Liver Pie, Alsatian—Large, Hot Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2318 Patties with Gravy—Small →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Delmonico's showpiece from Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), assembled from half a dozen cross-referenced preparations. The obstacle is not technique but the bird itself: plovers cannot legally be taken or bought in the United States or the United Kingdom today.

The birds are protectedPlovers are migratory birds protected in the U.S. under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and killing, possessing or selling them is an offence; the piping plover carries additional listing as a threatened species. In Britain the lapwing is protected and off the quarry list, while the golden plover remains a quarry species with an open season — but its sale is prohibited, so there is no lawful commercial supply of a dozen plovers, wild or farmed.
Market game is gone entirelyRanhofer wrote when American restaurants could buy wild shorebirds from market hunters. That trade was ended by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, implementing the 1916 convention, after the collapse of shorebird populations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A page like this is a record of the practice, not a usable order sheet.
What the cross-references containNo. 2314 is the hot pie crust used for Bontoux, No. 91 a game quenelle forcemeat, No. 419 mirepoix stock, No. 414 espagnole, No. 397 a reduced game fumet. Reading the dish requires all five; the entry alone is an assembly note.
"Sautoir" and "moderate fire"A sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan, used here as a shallow braising vessel rather than for frying. "A moderate fire" is stovetop language, not oven language: the birds are moistened with a little stock and cooked gently rather than hard-boiled.
Truffles at 1894 pricesWhole peeled medium truffles as a garnish, plus more diced into the forcemeat, was routine garnishing in this book and is now the single most expensive line in the recipe. Truffles generally reached New York preserved and imported from France.
If you want to cook from this pageUse a current recipe for a raised hot pie built on lawfully sourced game — farmed squab, quail or guinea fowl are the birds a modern kitchen actually has — and treat this entry as reading rather than as instructions.

A Little History

The Epicurean was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, published in 1894 and organised as a professional reference with every preparation numbered so that one dish could point to another. A gros pâté chaud was a set piece of the nineteenth-century service: a free-standing crust, baked hard and often decorated, filled at the last moment with birds and sauce and sent out whole. Plovers were a fashionable restaurant bird in that era because market hunters could deliver them cheaply in season along the Atlantic flyway, and menus of the 1880s and 1890s list them beside snipe, reedbird and rail. Within a generation the same hunting had emptied the flyway, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 closed the trade for good — so this recipe survives as evidence of an appetite that no longer has anything to feed on.