I have been looking at a copy of French Cooking for English Homes, edited and with recipes by Chester, Chef at the Hotel Chatham, Paris (London, Thornton Butterworth, 1923). "This book does not profess to be a complete manual of cooking, but rather a collection of recipes with a few hints for the use of the servantless lady, who, in these difficult post-war days, is reduced to doing her own cooking."
From time to time you may care to share some of the contents. I offer this evening:
Pluviers Rotis (Roast Plovers).
Wrap each plover in a sheet of buttered paper, grill them on a skewer, and serve on fried toast.
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8 comments:
Why fried toast I wonder?
doesn't the buttered paper catch fire?
Either you are all a set of very knowledgeable ornitologists or you are faking it. I had to look it up and found that "Plovers are a widely distributed group of wading birds belonging to the subfamily Charadriinae. There are about 40 species in the subfamily, most of them called "plover" or "dotterel"."
Some of them are a threatened species, for instance the Piping Plover. If you find a banded Piping Plover (Charadrius Melodus)you should not wrap it in buttered paper and grill it on a skewer but report it to piping.plover@usace.army.mil.
I did wonder what a plover might be but guessed a sort of pigeony bird, not a dear little wader;it seems such a simple recipe they've probably been brought to near extinction by the servantless English ladies in France looking for something quick for dinner.
I'll have to offer another recipe shortly.
Perhaps the buttered paper is for a flambe' finish.
Fried toast is croutons I think, those are fried or baked in clarified butter.
I looked up plover on Wkikpedia before commenting, as I was suspicious that everyone but me would know what one was. I'd glad I was wrong!
None of us are hunting and fishing types then, I'm sure they would know their plovers from their bitterns.
Gracious! I would never dream of shooting a Plover, those useful and distinguished little providers of Plovers' Eggs, which lightly boiled and served by the half-dozen make an excellent pre-prandial snack.
You don't state whether the Plover is to be 'drawn' prior to cooking; certainly both Snipe and Woodcock are cooked complete with head and entrails here in England (the heads being bent around so that the beak can be used to seal the bird's 'vent' during cooking)- about half an hour in a hot oven. They are then served on Anchovy toast.
R, you would know, and have set us right; plovers' eggs it is (um, what sort of size and colour are they again?).
As for cooking with insides in, there is a lot of that here; sometimes they take out the insides, variously clean and treat them, then put them back. I haven't looked too closely. Do you think that's why they were such inventive torturers in earlier days?
Heads complete with beaks, and the habit of eating small birds entire, bones and all, with a fair amount of spitting-out of bits, is enjoyed.
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