Home › The World's Kitchen › Roast Doe-Birds
Roast Doe-Birds
Singe, draw and truss six fine, fat doe-birds, place in a tin and arrange six slices larding pork on breast of each. Season evenly with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly baste with a little melted butter, then set in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish over six bread canapes decorate with a little watercress and serve with a little currant jelly separately.
The obstacle here is not technique but the bird itself. "Doe-bird" was a market and gunner's name for the Eskimo curlew, and the same name was loosely applied to other small shorebirds shot for the table; all of them are now off limits.
- The bird is protected, and probably goneThe Eskimo curlew was hunted commercially in enormous numbers through the late nineteenth century and was already in steep decline by the time this recipe was printed. It remains legally protected and listed, and there has been no confirmed record since the 1960s; it is widely thought to be extinct, though officially it is still classed as critically endangered or possibly extinct.
- Every likely substitute is also illegalThe other birds sold as doe-birds — godwits, dowitchers, plovers, other curlews — are migratory shorebirds covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its Canadian counterpart. Taking, possessing or selling them is prohibited, and there is no licensed commercial source.
- What to cook insteadIf you want the dish, use a current recipe for farmed quail or squab from a supplier. Do not treat the instructions above as a template to be transferred to a wild bird.
- "Brisk oven"Roughly 400-450F in period usage. Fifteen minutes at that heat leaves a small shorebird rare to medium-rare, which was the usual expectation for small game; tart currant jelly was the conventional accompaniment to game birds.
- Larding porkThin sheets of cured back fat or fatback, laid over the breast to keep a lean bird from drying. Modern sliced bacon is smokier and saltier and is not the same product.
- CanapésIn this period the word means the plate base, not a cocktail snack: rounds or ovals of bread fried in butter, set under the bird to catch the juices.
- YieldSix birds, one per person, as a course rather than a full plate.
"Doe-bird" belongs to the vocabulary of the American market gunner rather than the ornithologist. It was used along the Atlantic seaboard and in the Maritimes chiefly for the Eskimo curlew, a bird that migrated in flocks dense enough that shooters described killing dozens with a single discharge; the same birds were also called dough-birds, a name usually explained by the thick layer of fat they carried on migration, which made them prize eating. Filippini's book was compiled in the era when such birds still moved through New York's markets by the barrel alongside plover, snipe and reed-birds, and the recipe reflects the standard treatment for any small fat game bird: barded with pork, roasted hot and fast, served rare on fried bread with tart jelly. Within a generation of its publication the flocks were gone, and the recipe now reads less as instruction than as a record of what market hunting cost.