Home › Game › Small Birds Roasted
Small Birds Roasted
Wash quickly in one water, after they have been drawn. Season with salt and white pepper. Cut slices of salt pork very thin, and with small skewers, fasten a slice around each bird. Run a long skewer through the necks of the birds and rest it on a shallow baking pan. Put into a hot oven for fourteen minutes or before a hot fire for a quarter of an hour. Serve on toast. All small birds are nice cooked en casserole.
The instructions are clear enough, but the birds themselves are the problem: "small birds" in a turn-of-the-century American game chapter means songbirds, and taking them is now a federal offense.
- What "small birds" meantIn game chapters of this period the phrase covers reedbirds (bobolinks), robins, meadowlarks, plover, snipe and similar songbirds and shorebirds, sold by the dozen in city markets. They were cooked whole and eaten in a bite or two, which is why fourteen minutes was enough.
- Now protected by lawThe Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its later amendments make it illegal in the United States to kill, possess or sell nearly all of these species, including robins, bobolinks, larks and most shorebirds. No cooking method makes that lawful, and the birds are not sold anywhere legitimate.
- Undercooked as writtenFourteen minutes in a hot oven, or a quarter of an hour before the fire, is a very short time, and game birds of this period were commonly served rare at the bone. Applied to any modern bird it may not reach a safe internal temperature, and wild-caught birds can carry salmonella and campylobacter.
- "Drawn" and the single washDrawn means gutted; the instruction to run a skewer through the necks shows the heads were left on. "Wash quickly in one water" most likely warns against soaking, which waterlogs delicate flesh, rather than serving as a food-safety step.
- The salt pork wrapBarding with paper-thin salt pork was the standard fix for birds with almost no fat of their own. It is the whole technique of the recipe, and it tells you how lean and how small the birds were.
- "En casserole"In cookery of this period the phrase means cooked in a covered stewpan or earthenware pot, not a baked casserole dish in the modern American sense. The closing line notes that small birds also take well to slow, moist cooking.
- If you want the dishFarmed quail and, where the season allows, legally taken dove are the modern stand-ins for this style of cookery. Use a current recipe with stated temperatures rather than adapting this one.
Roasted small birds on toast were a fixture of American and European tables well into the nineteenth century and beyond, and the dish was an ordinary market purchase rather than an exotic one. Reedbirds - bobolinks fattening in the autumn rice fields of the Carolinas and the marshes of the Delaware - were shipped north and sold cheaply in Philadelphia and New York, and robins were openly sold in southern markets. The trade collapsed under the same wave of protective legislation that ended commercial plume hunting: state laws through the 1890s and 1900s, the Lacey Act of 1900 restricting interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and finally the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which put songbirds permanently off the menu. A page like this one is a small record of what disappeared from American cooking, and of how routine it once was.