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.

Co-blogger Waddling Thunder has inspired a new genre of post, so:

In the mood for something yummy without being fancypants, we simply took the half-emptied container of fresh goat cheese (acquired at Zabar's before leaving Manhattan, and still smelling deliciously of yogurt) and spooned the contents into two steaming bowls of De Cecco spaghettini. Add copious quantities of black pepper, to taste. Devour.

A 3:30 snack of cold roast chicken (yum: eaten by the greasy fingers-full with my girlfriend) inspired digressive research into that odd delicacy, the ortolan. (No, Star Wars freaks, this is not the same as the furry blue elephant of Max Rebo's Jabba's Palace Band fame.)

The ortolan is a teeny French songbird, typically fattened, drowned in Armagnac, cooked and served whole to slavering diners. There's a ritual of consuming them shrouded in a napkin a la Rene Magritte to maximize fumes and hide the unsightly task. (The bird's innards are not removed; it is traditional to consume everything but the beak, using one's hands.)

The ortolan is now an endangered species, so it is a forbidden pleasure, though Mitterand is said to have feasted on them for his last meal. Still, it is said to embody the soul of France. [Query: What does it say about a country when its soul food is illegal?]

Anyway, if ortolans are so delicious and so sought-after, why not let somebody breed and grow them by the industrial cage-ful, like foie-gras geese or chickens for the slaughter? This kind of market-driven mass breeding would probably bring up the ortolan's numbers while also letting bizarre gourmands get their wicked fix. Even if civilized nations raise legal barriers, a shady factory in some backwater nation could do the job for now.

If there's a market for football games, fake girlfriends, rocks and socks, why not these poor little birds? They could use our help.

Incidentally, rumor has it that the ortolan is properly cooked in a special frying pan used exclusively for ortolans, where it cooks in its own fat. Advice on where to find such a pan is welcome.

I've visited enough restaurants to know not to be fazed by minor, or even relatively major, imperfections. The terrible secret of the restaurant business, it seems to me, is that most places are bad.

Having said that, though, responding to an order for french fries by prying open a defrosted box of name brand oven chips (available from the local grocer) and putting them in the toaster is new to me. To the staff of "Doghouse" in Harvard Square - my congratulations.