No. 2454

Chaudfroid of Larks

Chaudfroid de Mauviettes

Bone two dozen clean larks; spread them open on the table and season; prepare a boned game forcemeat (No. 66), season highly and add to it a few spoonfuls of liver baking forcemeat (No. 64), and some of the fried lark intestines, also a few spoonfuls of raw, chopped truffles. Use this forcemeat for filling the birds, and roll them up into balls, sew them up with coarse thread, and cook for twenty minutes in a very little good, reduced stock, and covered over with fat pork; remove from the fire and cool them off in their own stock, then drain, unwrap, and trim each one neatly, and rounded. Take them up one by one, and dip them in a brown chaudfroid (No. 594), thickened properly on ice; lay them at once on a grate, and let the sauce harden in the ice-box. Pare the larks from any excess of sauce, cover with a light layer of jelly applied with a brush, and when this has become quite cold, dress them in a pyramid form on a cold dish, and surround with more jelly.

← No. 2453 Chaudfroid of Young Guinea Fowls The Cold Service No. 2455 Chaudfroid of Partridges a la Beatrice →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's larks belong to a vanished style of banquet cookery, and the central ingredient can no longer legally be bought, shot or served in the United States or most of Europe.

The birds are protectedSkylarks and the other small songbirds sold as mauviettes are protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and in the EU under the Birds Directive, though some member states (France among them) still allow limited traditional lark hunting; commercial sale is barred. No substitute instruction is offered here.
No lawful supply existsIn Ranhofer's New York, larks were sold as market game. That trade was shut down by the same early twentieth-century legislation that ended the sale of wild ducks and plover; there is no licensed commercial source today.
The fried intestinesSmall birds were traditionally cooked with the trail in, and the recipe asks for the fried intestines to go into the forcemeat. Wild bird viscera carry a real load of enteric bacteria and parasites, and lightly frying them is not a kill step.
Chaudfroid is a room-temperature serviceA chaudfroid is coated, set on ice, glazed with aspic and then displayed. The finished pyramid sits in the danger zone for the length of a buffet, which is precisely why modern aspic work is done with strict chilling and short display windows. Anyone wanting to cook in this style should follow a current recipe with measured temperatures.
What the cross-references areNo. 66 is a game forcemeat, No. 64 a liver-based baking forcemeat, and No. 594 the brown chaudfroid sauce, which the recipe says is thickened over ice. The Epicurean is built out of these numbered dependencies.
The method, for readingEach bird is boned, stuffed, sewn into a ball, barded with fat pork and braised briefly in a very small quantity of heavily reduced stock, then cooled in that stock so it sets to jelly around them. The technique is worth understanding even where the dish cannot be reproduced.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's, and its cold service chapter is a record of what a New York banquet table was expected to display rather than merely feed. Mauviette is the French market name for a lark, often said to refer to birds taken in autumn, when they were fat. Small birds were eaten whole and with the trail in, a practice that survived longest with the ortolan and is now generally illegal wherever it is remembered. The chaudfroid itself -- a cooked dish served cold under a set sauce and a coat of clear jelly -- was the great vehicle of nineteenth-century display cookery, and dishes like this one, twenty-four identical glazed spheres built into a pyramid, show how much of that kitchen's labour went into things meant to be looked at before they were eaten.