No. 2324

Thrush Pudding

Pouding de Grives

Butter and line a dome form mold with a woodcock pudding paste (No. 2325), made with beef suet, butter, salt and flour. Fry in butter over a quick fire, some fat pork, ham and twenty-four boneless thrushes; as soon as done, drain off the fat and add salt, pepper, chopped parsley, Madeira sauce and half-glaze (No. 400). Place all of this in the dome and cover with a flat of the same paste; lay a wet and buttered cloth over and fasten it strongly underneath on the rounded side, set this in boiling water and let cook for an hour and a half, unwrap and turn it out of the mold on a hot dish and pour over a good Madeira sauce (No. 492) with game essence added (No. 389), serving a part of it separately.

← No. 2323 Lamb Pudding—Minion Fillets a la Gladstone Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2325 Woodcock Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a suet-crust steamed pudding of the English kind, filled with small whole birds. The filling is the problem: the birds it calls for cannot legally be taken, sold or served in the United States or most of Europe.

Thrushes are protected birdsSong thrushes, fieldfares, redwings, mistle thrushes and the American robin are all thrushes. In the United States thrushes are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes killing, possessing or selling them an offence. In the European Union the Birds Directive protects wild birds generally, but several thrush species sit on Annex II and may still be hunted in season in some member states, including France, Italy and Spain; their sale is generally barred, and illegal trapping for the table has been prosecuted repeatedly in France and Italy. There is no lawful commercial source for twenty-four thrushes in the United States.
The cross-reference is no betterThe paste in No. 2325 belongs to a woodcock pudding. Woodcock is a regulated game bird with a short season and a bag limit in the United States, and it may not be bought or sold. A recipe that assumes a poulterer's window full of small wild birds assumes a trade that no longer exists.
No safe substitution is offered hereQuail and squab are farmed and legal, but reworking the filling changes the cooking time, the fat content and the seasoning balance, and this page is not the place for a rewritten version. If you want a steamed suet pudding of small birds, use a current game-pudding recipe written for farmed poultry.
What the method was doingWorth understanding even if you do not make it: the birds are browned hard in fat, sauced, sealed in a suet crust and steamed a full hour and a half in a cloth-tied dome mould. The recipe specifies the thrushes boned, and the long moist heat cooks them through in the sauce rather than roasting them.
Madeira sauce and half-glazeRanhofer's No. 400 half-glaze is a reduced brown sauce, essentially demi-glace; No. 389 game essence is a concentrated reduction of game trimmings. Both are long-simmered stock preparations rather than pantry items, which is part of why this entry reads as a professional restaurant instruction rather than a domestic one.

A Little History

Small birds eaten whole were a staple of nineteenth-century European luxury cooking, and Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, worked in a market where thrushes, larks, ortolans, reedbirds and woodcock arrived by the barrel in season. The pudding form itself is English: a suet crust lining a basin, filled, sealed, tied in a floured cloth and boiled, the same construction as a steak and kidney pudding, here given a French name and a Madeira sauce to suit a New York dining room that spoke menu French. The trade that supplied it collapsed within a generation. Market gunning and the songbird trade were among the practices the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was written to stop, and recipes like this one survive mainly as evidence of how much of the wild was once considered grocery.