No. 2599

Terrine of Larks

Terrine de Mauviettes

Bone two or three dozen larks: season, cook a part of the intestines with fat pork and then pass them through a sieve. Prepare a pound and a half of chopped galantine forcemeat (No. 66), place it in a vessel and mix in with it a few spoonfuls of cooked fine herbs (No. 385), chopped truffles and the intestine pulp. Spread the larks on the table and lay in each one a forcemeat ball. Line a terrine used for cooking and proceed to fill it exactly as described for terrine of ducks' liver a l'Aquitaine (No. 2596). Bake slowly for an hour and a quarter; let it cool, pressing it slightly half an hour after it leaves the oven; when cold garnish with jelly.

← No. 2598 Terrine of Hare Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2600 Terrine de Nerac →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a Gilded Age restaurant preparation built on a bird that can no longer be bought, hunted or served in most of the world. The points below explain what stands in the way rather than how to get around it.

The birdsMauviettes are skylarks and related small songbirds, taken by net or lime in enormous numbers in nineteenth-century Europe. Most wild songbirds are protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and in the European Union under the Birds Directive; commercial sale of wild-caught larks is prohibited, though limited hunting derogations have persisted in parts of France. There is no ordinary legal commercial source for two or three dozen larks.
The intestinesSmall game birds were traditionally cooked undrawn, the trail being considered the best part. Here a part of the entrails is cooked with fat pork, sieved and worked into the forcemeat before the terrine goes into the oven. Gut contents of wild-caught birds are exactly where Salmonella and Campylobacter concentrate, and the recipe gives neither an internal temperature nor any way to judge one through a pressed loaf.
The slow oven"Bake slowly for an hour and a quarter" is all the instruction given: no temperature, no water bath, doneness judged by the cook's eye. A dense forcemeat terrine of that depth may or may not reach a safe core temperature in that time, and Ranhofer offers no check.
Cooling under weightPressing half an hour out of the oven, then holding the terrine at room temperature until cold, leaves a meat pate for hours in the range where bacteria multiply fastest. Modern charcuterie practice chills terrines promptly and presses them under refrigeration.
The cross-referencesThe recipe is unusable on its own in any case: No. 66 is Ranhofer's chopped galantine forcemeat, No. 385 his cooked fine herbs, and the whole assembly method is deferred to No. 2596, the terrine of duck livers a l'Aquitaine. Nothing here tells you proportions of pork, veal, fat or seasoning.
If you want a game terrineUse a current recipe worked out for farmed poultry or legally sold game, with stated weights, a curing salt quantity if one is called for, and a target internal temperature.

A Little History

Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years at Delmonico's in New York, and the book records what a great restaurant kitchen of that moment could actually put on a table -- including songbirds by the dozen. Larks, ortolans, thrushes and buntings were staple luxury game across France and Italy, netted on migration and sold in city markets by the string; the French mauviette is a general term for the lark, though it is often said to carry the sense of the bird taken in autumn, when it was reckoned fattest. Such birds recur through the book, and here in a pressed terrine finished with aspic for the cold buffet. The trade collapsed in the twentieth century, first under pressure from bird-protection societies and then under law: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 in the United States and successive European conventions ended the market, and the recipe survives now as a record of how thoroughly a taste can be legislated out of existence.