Home › Meats and Entrees › Lark Pie
Lark Pie
(Pithiviers.) This is a celebrated pie, eaten only at this French town, but an excellent imitation can be made in this country, using our own reed birds. Line a dish with puff paste, bake it 10 minutes to color it, and allow it to rise, cover this with a layer of sausage meat, and fill it with 12 fine birds, stuffed with a forcemeat containing truffles, then cover them with another layer of sausage meat, and another of paste. Paint the outside with yolk of egg to give a fine glaze, and bake it 1 1/2 hours. A hole left in the centre must now be filled, pouring in a cup of melted aspic jelly, flavored with a little wine, and the pie served cold.
The obstacle here is not technique but the birds themselves. Both species named in this recipe are illegal to take, sell, or serve in the United States and across Europe.
- Reed birds are bobolinksThe "reed bird" of nineteenth-century American markets is the bobolink, shot by the thousand in rice and reed marshes and sold by the dozen. It is a migratory songbird protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918; taking, possessing, or selling one is a federal offense, and there is no lawful supply.
- Larks likewiseThe skylark and its relatives are protected under UK wild bird legislation and across much of Europe, though the skylark remains huntable in a few EU states under national derogations. The market trade in small birds for the table that this recipe assumes was largely closed down over the course of the twentieth century.
- No substitution is impliedA pie of this construction is not simply a matter of swapping in another small bird; the whole point of the dish was the quantity of tiny carcasses. If you want a raised game pie, work from a current recipe using farmed poultry or game with a modern time and temperature.
- The wider problem of songbird cookeryBooks of this era treat robins, ortolans, thrushes and plover as ordinary market poultry. Recipes for any of them should be read as historical documents rather than instructions, whatever the rest of the method looks like.
- Terms, for readingForcemeat is a seasoned ground stuffing bound with fat and egg; aspic jelly is clarified savory stock set with its own gelatin, here poured through a vent hole so it fills the gaps as it cools. "Paint with yolk of egg" is an egg wash.
- On the bake timeAn hour and a half suits a pie packed solid with meat and pastry baked in a range of uneven heat. The recipe finishes the dish cold, set in its jelly.
Pithiviers, a town in the Loiret south of Paris, is known to modern cooks for its almond-cream puff pastry gâteau, but it had an older reputation for pâté d'alouettes, a lark pie sold to travelers and sent to Paris as a regional delicacy. Small migratory birds were a genuine commodity in both France and the United States in the nineteenth century, and American cookbooks of the 1890s list reed birds and rice birds as cheap, plentiful autumn game. This entry is characteristic of With a Saucepan Over the Sea, a book built on the premise that a European specialty can be reproduced at home with a local equivalent — an appealing idea that here rests on a market that no longer exists and, by law, cannot.