Why Is The Ortalon Bunting (Of All Birds) Drowned In Cognac?

by LivingbyaWillow

When it comes to questions about the history of ortalon, I usually hear people ask about the practice of covering one’s face with white cloth and the colloquial explanations given for it.

I am more curious about the dish than the eater for this post. If this isn’t too open a question: why is the ortalon specifically drowned in cognac? I can see the logic for chefs saturating meat with liquor, but why the case for this bird for so long. Is there a cultural connotation to the consumption of this songbird? Is it rooted in some specific cookbook or a historical dinner? Does the ortalon have some known gastronomic property that made chefs value its meat for this cooking method?

gerardmenfin

(In addition to u/MustacheEmperor comment).

The question is: is the whole ritual - from the drowning in armagnac to the people eating the bird under a towel to fully absorb the aroma and flavors - actually a tradition?

When one looks at texts from the 18th century to the early 20th century, the only thing consistent about ortolan bunting in France is that those birds were captured, fattened in the dark for a couple of weeks, and killed once they had become little balls of fat. Chaumel and De La Mare, in their agricultural dictionary (1767) dedicate several pages to the capture and fattening of ortolans, but do not mention how they were killed. Likewise, neither Buffon in his Histoire naturelle des oiseaux (1778), nor the authors of the Encyclopédie (1765), allude to the way the little birdies became ex-ortolans.

Were ortolans good? They were delicacies, but only to a certain point. Here is what says a cooking manual from the early 19th century (Une société de gens de bouche, 1811):

Boiled or roasted, they are seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice, but, in spite of this corrective, there are few people who can eat a certain quantity without becoming disgusted. Two or three are enough for delicate stomachs.

The cooking guide of Chévrier (1835) mentions that Louis XVIII loved pureed ortolans with truffles (which he cooked himself) and that he and his friend the Duke of Escars ate so much of it that the latter died of indigestion (I haven't verified if this anecdote is true). Ortolans: the fugu of 19th century French cuisine.

One traditional recipe consisted in cooking the birds in eggshells but this seems to have gone out of fashion because ewwww, as told by the Dictionnaire général de la cuisine française of 1853:

As there are people to whom this exhumation of an ortolan might give the false idea of a stillborn chick in a hatched egg, this old way of serving these little birds has been abandoned almost everywhere.

The first mention of the way ortolans were pining for the fjords is in Alexandre Dumas' Grand dictionnaire de cuisine (1873), where the Three Musketeers author claims that people in Toulouse asphyxiate the bird in a "very strong vinegar, a violent death that improves their flesh". Yes, vinegar: so much for pricey brandy. Vinegar had been mentioned by Chaumel and De La Mare in 1767, but only for the preparation (and preservation?) of ortolans in Cyprus.

Dumas also reports a sophisticated method to eat ortolans and other small birds, first described by Canon Charcot and told by Brillat-Savarin in his Physiologie du goût (1826), and which seems to form the basis of the "ritual" considered today as "traditional".

Begin by removing the gizzard, then take a small fat bird by the beak, sprinkle it with a little salt and pepper; push it skilfully into your mouth, without touching it with your lips or teeth, slice it close to your fingers and chew it briskly. The result is a juice abundant enough to envelop the whole organ and in this chewing you will taste a pleasure unknown to the vulgar.

Note that Brillat-Savarin, in his Physiologie 1) tells that this process was unknown to most people, 2) that it had been told to him confidentially by Charcot, and 3) it was applicable to all small fat birds. Also, no towel. The whole "birdie-sucking" method was invented by a priest: it was not traditional. Nineteenth century authors of cooking guides, including Dumas, provide many different recipes for ortolans. Those guides almost read like this:

You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, ortolan-kabobs, ortolan creole, ortolan gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried.

Ortolan was a delicacy, but it was also one of the many small birds - such as flycatchers, robins, tits, larks, and a whole cornucopia of cute and feathered critters - that ended up on French tables. In other words, the ortolan did not yet have the legendary (and a little bit scandalous) aura that it has today.

The first mention of ortolans being killed by drowning in armagnac is in a book of regionalist author Joseph de Pesquidoux (Chez nous, 1921), who described the ortolan capture, fattening, and consumption process in the Gers departement (Southwest France):

They fatten up prodigiously. Fifteen or twenty days later they are released. Short joy. Their beaks are dipped in a glass of Armagnac. They choke, they swallow a mouthful while trying to breathe, they expire... But they remain perfumed... This is how you eat them. You take them by one leg and bite them in one bite, whole, with the bones, like a sweet.

Somehow, the way the birds were killed in some areas of Southwest France had switched from vinegar to armagnac. The rational is more or less the same as the one given by Dumas: it made the flesh taste better. The next year, in 1922, François Mauriac's novel Le baiser au lépreux (which also takes place in Southwest France) had a character who "smothered ortolans in an old armagnac", so there was something there. Note that neither Pesquidoux nor Mauriac mention the whole towel ritual.

An anonymous writer of the entertainment newspaper Comœdia (1927) resented those alcoholic deaths, refering to Pesquidoux (which also shows that this was not yet mainstream):

Is it really useful to cause suffering to those whom we intend to eat, and do we not lose a little of our dignity by refining the death of a weak being who only wanted to live and sing? And all for the sole joy of our senses!

In 1924, as there was a debate about bird protection in France, a magazine (that I have not identified) published a photo essay on ortolan production. Colette (the third celebrated writer of this story after Dumas and Mauriac) then wrote an impassioned article about the sorry state of animal welfare in France and the mistreatment suffered by livestock, pets, laboratory animals, and ortolans:

But read this month, in an illustrated magazine, about the manner of capturing, confining, feeding and then suffocating ortolans: thousands of them, hardly bigger than hornets, they pant, first in grilled traps, then a black attic awaits them, where the captives, those who do not die, are fed restricted diets. There they wither in a peculiar way, which turns them into balls of fat, and their feathers sometimes spontaneously fall out of their distended skin, thin as the membranes of bats. This is the moment - the magazine explains consciously - to kill them "by crushing their beaks". A photograph shows a good ortolan killer, a model worker, crushing the beaks of two birds at a time. The work, paid by the piece, forms virtuosos; this one smiles a good man's smile.

So while Pesquidoux and Mauriac witnessed artisanal methods for killing ortolans in Southwestern villages, it seems that the semi-industrial outfits that provided upper-class markets in Paris and elsewhere with ortolans used quicker, cheaper, and less "refined" methods (if one considers that being drowned in armagnac is refined).

The whole ortolan-killing-and-eating bizarre ritual may have been set in stone in the 1920-1930s (not sure about the towel though). More research is needed there to understand why people started believing that there was "one right way" to consume ortolans and started calling it a tradition. I suppose that it has to do with ortolans becoming a "status" food - rare, expensive, forbidden, or tied regionally with reinvented traditions.

As often happens, there is a lot of rewriting at play here: ortolans were delicacies, but so were flycatchers and robins; there were many ways to prepare them, including some that people eventually found disgusting; one priest thought that fatty little birds should be eaten whole and some unknown person later added a towel ritual; at some point people in certain areas of the Southwest started killing the birds creatively, one by one, slowly, using fine brandy, but some did not bother because they had thousands of ortolans to kill and ship to Paris in deceased form and they were not going to waste armagnac on this.

Sources

MustacheEmperor

OP and sub, my caveat is that I am a longtime reader and very seldom if ever contributor to /r/askhistorians, so if this reply is not up to subreddit standards I hope it is removed and someone provides a better one. But this subject is personally very fascinating to me and I have previously done some (very entry level) academic food research, so I've pulled together the best reply I can.

First, I think it's worth clarifying that the ortolan bunting is traditionally drowned in Armagnac, not cognac - both brandies, but each named for different places in France.

Kept alive until the last minute, they were drowned in Armagnac, plucked, sautéed, and served in individual lidded pots called cassolettes, which could only hold one or two birds [Spence / Youssef, Flavour, 2015]

FW Barnicoat's article A Few Examples of the Study and Keeping of Birds in the Roman World traces the practice of fattening up the ortolan for consumption back to Roman aviaries, but makes no mention of armagnac.

Varro also tells us that he had an ornitho (bird-house or aviary) at his villa in Casinum. It consisted of three colonnaded chambers and a domed house containing several thousand fieldfares, blackbirds, ortolan buntings and quail in porticoed bays and restrained by hemp nets rather than rigid bars. These birds were fattened on a paste made of figs and meal

Armagnac is "the oldest known wine spirit" and "Comte d' Armagnac became the first region of France to develop distillation," but Bertrand notes that although the Romans introduced grapes to France, distillation wasn't developed until much later, when "most of Aquitaine was English" [Bertrand, Fermented Beverage Production, 2003]

So the practice of fattening up the bunting in an enclosed space to eat as a delicacy emerged as early as the first Roman occupation of the bunting's territory, and certainly was in practice by the lifetime of Varro circa 116BC. But the practice of drowning it in Armagnac must have by definition emerged afterwards, as that spirit didn't exist yet.

So the questions this raise for me are: Why drown it in Armagnac then? And when did that start? I think I can outline an answer to the former, but I cannot find any sources for the latter.

Contemporary coverage of the nature of this recipe describes the liquor as "used to drown and marinade the bird at the same time" (I can also source this to Wildlife Criminology, 2020, but unfortunately the relevant text is only accessible as an excerpt in Google Scholar).

Rudolph Chelminksi's Life and Death in Haute Cuisine describes the bunting as "reputed to be France's greatest single delicacy."

Brandy, A Global History describes "Cognac, armagnac, and brandy De Jerez are the three most famous - and expensive - noble Old World brandies."

So the basic concept of consuming a fattened bunting is older than Armagnac, which is itself the oldest distilled wine in the world. Both are closely tied to the culinary culture of France, tracing back before the existence of the combined French state. Like the dish, the spirit is considered a high-end or haute cuisine product.

Considering the culinary role of the liquor in this dish as documented above: specifically to marinate the bird with a high-concentration distilled spirit. And likewise the nature of the marinated ortolan: France's single greatest delicacy. With Armagnac being France's oldest distilled wine, produced in smaller batches than Cognac (there's simply a much smaller growing region), and sold at high prices, it became the traditional means of preparing this ancient dish of the wealthy when it began to include the spirit marinade.

I had difficulty finding academic research specific to the origins of the bunting as haute cuisine within my available databases, and I cannot find a scholarly source specifically analyzing the moment in time when the French began marinating the bunting after it was fattened up for consumption, which I think would provide the rest of the context needed to explain this connection. Hopefully, someone else can find one, and this answer can provide a useful starting point. Edit: And someone sure did, thank you /u/gerardmenfin !