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Plovers in Cases
Cut off the necks, wings and feet from six fat picked and singed plovers; cut open through the back, remove the intestines and keep the livers and hearts. Remove all the bones, without cutting the skin. Place the bones, hearts, livers, necks, wings and feet in a saucepan with one gill demi-glace and one gill tomato sauce, adding one bay leaf, a saltspoon thyme, half saltspoon sage, one branch parsley and one branch chervil. Mix a little, cover the pan, and let simmer for thirty-five minutes; add one tablespoon of sherry; lightly mix; let boil for five minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth into a bowl, and keep warm till required.
Chop very finely two ounces lean raw veal, then pound it in a mortar with yolk of one egg, half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a half saltspoon ground nutmeg to a fine paste. Divide this paste in the centre of the six boned plovers, spread over evenly, then give them their original forms, tie around with a string; lay on a roasting tin, place a very thin slice of larding pork over the breasts of each. Set in the oven to roast for twenty minutes. Remove from the oven, remove the pork, untie, then place in oval paper cases; spread a teaspoon of the sauce over each breast; arrange the cases on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with parsley and serve with the rest of the sauce separately.
This is a professional restaurant preparation from the era when small wild birds were sold by the dozen in city markets. It cannot be made legally in the United States today, and several of its steps would be unsafe even if the birds were available.
- The birds are protectedPlovers are migratory shorebirds covered in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and some species — the piping plover among them — are listed as threatened or endangered. Killing, buying, selling or possessing them is prohibited in the US, and there is no legal supply chain there for six fat plovers. Protection elsewhere varies: Canada has comparable law, while golden plover remains a legal quarry species in parts of Europe.
- Raw veal forcemeat, twenty minutesEach bird is stuffed with a pounded paste of raw veal and egg yolk and roasted only twenty minutes under a pork bard. In a boned, re-formed bird the stuffing sits at the thermal centre and will not reliably reach a safe temperature in that time. This is the step that makes the dish a food-safety problem quite apart from the legal one.
- Offal in the sauceThe hearts, livers and trimmings of wild-caught birds go into the sauce base. Wild game offal is where environmental contaminants can concentrate; the recipe does at least specify a thirty-five minute simmer and five minutes at a boil.
- If you want the dishCook something else. A current recipe for stuffed farmed quail or poussin, with tested internal temperatures, is the place to go — not an adaptation of these instructions.
- Reading the old measuresA gill is half a cup, so the sauce base begins with a cup of liquid in total. A saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. "Larding pork" here is a thin sheet of pork fat laid over the breast as a bard, sold today as barding fat.
- Demi-glace and paper casesDemi-glace here means the classic reduction of brown stock and espagnole, not the thin commercial concentrate. "Oval paper cases" are pleated caisses — stiff parchment shells the bird is served in, once standard for small roasted game.
- YieldSix birds. The recipe does not state servings; one bird per person is the likely intent.
Small wild birds in paper cases belong to the grand-hotel cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when golden plover, snipe, woodcock and lark were ordinary market game in New York, London and Paris and appeared on menus by the dozen. The International Cook Book, generally dated to 1906 and reissued later, was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's, and the technique here — boning a bird without breaking the skin, stuffing it with a pounded veal farce, re-forming it, barding the breast and serving it in a caisse with its own bones reduced into the sauce — is restaurant work set down for a domestic audience that mostly would never attempt it. The recipe is also a small record of what happened next: market hunting of shorebirds for the table was one of the practices that drove the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and within a few years of this book's publication the main ingredient had passed out of legal commerce entirely.