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Roast Plover
Pick, singe, draw and neatly wipe, then pick out the eyes, tear off the neck skin and truss the legs together; skewer with the bill through the legs under the breast. Lay a very thin slice of pork over the breast of each bird. Season evenly with a half teaspoon each salt and white pepper. Arrange on a roasting tin and roast in a brisk oven for ten minutes. Remove, dress on six freshly prepared toasts, decorate with a little watercress and serve.
This is a wild-game recipe from an era when small shorebirds were sold openly by poulterers. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are legal as much as culinary.
- Plover are protected birdsIn the United States plovers are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which makes killing, possessing or selling them an offence; several, including the piping plover, carry additional endangered or threatened status. In the UK grey plover is protected, while golden plover remains a quarry species with an open season, though sale of the dead bird is restricted. There is no ordinary commercial source for the bird this recipe calls for.
- Market hunting is what this recipe assumesWhen the book was written, plover and other small waders were shot commercially in large numbers and shipped to city markets. That trade is precisely what the migratory bird laws of the early twentieth century were written to end, and the collapse of several shorebird populations is the reason.
- The birds are deliberately undercookedThe birds are barely cooked -- Ten minutes in a hot oven leaves a small wild bird rare in the centre, in line with the period taste for underdone game. Wild birds carry Salmonella and Campylobacter, and shot birds may carry lead fragments in the breast meat, so this timing is not safe by current standards.
- Not drawn in the older traditionThe recipe does say to draw the birds, but note that plover, snipe and woodcock were classically roasted undrawn, with the trail left in and spread on the toast.
- The head is left on"Skewer with the bill through the legs" means the head stays attached and the long beak is used as the trussing pin. It is a presentation convention for small game birds and tells you the whole bird arrived at table.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a farmed game bird such as quail or squab, cooked to a measured internal temperature. Nothing on this page should be treated as a working method.
Roast plover belongs to the vanished world of the nineteenth-century game market, when barrels of golden plover, snipe, woodcock and even robins moved by rail to the restaurants of New York and appeared on menus beside canvasback duck. The bird was cooked whole and fast, laid over a slab of fried bread or toast so the juices soaked in, and finished with watercress and a slice of pork or bacon to keep the lean breast from drying. Its presence in The International Cook Book marks it as high restaurant cookery. In the decades after the book's publication the trade it depended on was largely illegal: the Weeks-McLean Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act closed the market-hunting of migratory birds in the United States, and recipes like this one became historical documents rather than instructions.