Important: Safety Warning

This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.

In addition, this page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 2601

Terrine of Plovers and Larks

Terrine de Pluviers et Mauviettes

Take off the fillets from eight plovers; remove their skin, lay them in a vessel and season with salt and spices, and moisten with a little brandy and Madeira. Detach and cut up the leg meats; put four ounces of fat pork in a sautoir, and when melted add the intestines without the gizzard and pouch; fry all together over a brisk fire with half a pound of chicken livers, the cut-up leg meats, and some chopped shallots and mushrooms; when this is cold pound it with an equal quantity of chopped-up fresh fat pork, and press the preparation through a sieve. Cover the bottom and sides of a terrine with thin bards of fat pork; over this a layer of forcemeat; fill the center with the skinned plover fillets; on this lay a layer of the prepared forcemeat; on this some larks boned and stuffed with game forcemeat made with a pound of game, the same of fat pork, a few truffles and pistachios, and small squares of ham; now place another layer of the forcemeat, more fillets, and so on until the terrine is quite full; all these ingredients should be well seasoned; range on top a bard of the fat pork and the cover; put it in a low saucepan containing a little water; cook in a moderate oven for an hour and a half, and when the meats are done press down lightly, and set it aside to cool. Fill the terrine with melted butter and lard, half of each, and use only when cold.

← No. 2600 Terrine de Nerac Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2602 Terrine of Pork Liver →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's terrine belongs to a moment when wild plover and lark were market game in New York. Both the birds and the preserving method put it outside what can be cooked today.

The birds are protectedPlovers and larks are migratory birds protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In Europe they fall under the Birds Directive, which bars commercial sale, though a few species (European golden plover, skylark) may still be hunted for personal consumption in some member states. There is no legitimate commercial supplier, which alone makes the recipe unmakeable as written.
The undrawn intestinesThe recipe fries the birds' intestines, minus gizzard and pouch, into the forcemeat; the "trail" of small game birds was used this way in period cookery. Gut contents are a route for Salmonella and Campylobacter into the preparation. The gut is fried before it is pounded and the terrine then bakes for an hour and a half, but no internal temperature is given and none can be assumed.
Sealing under fat is a preservation step, not a garnishThe finished terrine is filled with melted butter and lard to exclude air, the method used for keeping potted meats in a cold larder. Without measured cure, controlled acidity or refrigeration, an anaerobic fat seal over cooked meat held at larder temperature is a setting in which Clostridium botulinum can grow. Anyone wanting a game terrine should work from a current recipe with stated internal temperatures and storage times.
What the vocabulary meansA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan; bards are thin sheets of back fat used to line the mould; the terrine itself is the lidded earthenware dish, which here sits in a low saucepan of water as a bain-marie.
The oven"Moderate oven" has no fixed modern equivalent; it is conventionally read as somewhere in the region of 350F. An hour and a half in a covered terrine set in water is a slow, protected bake, and the recipe specifies no internal temperature for the raw offal worked into the forcemeat.
ScaleEight plovers, half a pound of chicken livers, a pound of game and a pound of fat pork for the lark stuffing, plus the bards: this is a large restaurant terrine intended to be sliced onto a cold buffet, not a household dish.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's, and it documents an American luxury table that ran on wild game. Plover, snipe, woodcock, reedbird and lark all appear on nineteenth-century menus in the United States and were sold openly in city markets; in France, mauviette was the market name for the skylark and the tiny stuffed bird was a classic of Pithiviers and the Beauce. Market hunting on this scale is what prompted the Lacey Act of 1900 and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which ended the commercial trade and turned recipes like this one into historical documents. The construction itself, alternating layers of seasoned fillet and a sieved liver-and-pork forcemeat inside a bard-lined mould, then sealed under fat, is the standard pâté en terrine technique of the period and survives essentially unchanged in charcuterie made from legal farmed and hunted meats.