More on the Ortolan


Will's post on the Ortolan piqued my interest, of course. I knew about the bird (it's hard to get through an undergraduate course in early modern food history otherwise), but not that much. So I poked around in my food library this evening for more information.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything about a traditional skillet or pan for the dish. Given that the poor thing is close to extinction and also extremely expensive, I'm not sure how useful a specific way to cook it would be. Still, it's a more interesting white elephant than a melon baller to have around, I suppose. I'd like one too.

I was able to unearth some interesting tidbits about the bird, though, in addition to those Will notes below. First, there are a variety of ways to cook it. My 1964 Larousse Gastronomique says that you can roast it plain, of course, but you can also wrap it in vine leaves and bake, or, most luxuriously, stuff it with a whole truffle and foie gras. Escoffier mentions those more complicated recipes in passing, along with another dish involving an Ortolan and pineapple juice (?), but unsurprisingly notes that the best way by far is the plainest.

I've never seen an ortolan, but from the descriptions I read we're clearly not dealing with something grouse or pheasant sized. Almost every recipe suggests half a dozen ortolans per person, and one particularly enthusiastic chef a full twelve. It's not very surprising, then, that in the 40 years from the 1964 Larousse to the latest edition, the beleagured bird has gone from "quite plentiful" to endangered, nor that the book's coverage has shrunk from almost a full page and nine recipes to a desultory paragraph. Still, I'm perversely glad to report that according to a couple of things I read, the natives of Landes, from where the Ortolan hales, are still somewhat heroically trying to eat the thing into extinction, efforts of the French state regardless.
So there it is, briefly - the short, tasty, sad story of an unfortunate creature - the Ortolan of southern France.