Bird stew was a Maine dish of my boyhood. It meant wild birds, never tame. It tasted and trembled of the wild.
Bird stew spelled the waders, not the swimmers with webbed feet—not ducks, coot, or geese. It meant plovers, sandpeeps, spoonbill plover, the heron—on occasions when hunger for wild meat pinched us thin—and especially, oh very honorably especially, mash hens. For that was the way we Yankees, innocent of the uncomfortable letter R, pronounced marsh hens. The Indian word for them was qwoks. No U in it. This word, so far as 1 know, is the only word in English where a Q is not followed by a U. The name of the bird comes from the sound he makes, as the Abenokis heard him make it long, long ago. It is exactly the cry he makes when the twilight brings him out of the deep balsams, when the title is slanting in at the flood over the mudflats. Then this walking dish of the star-eyed gods comes out to commence his night-long pacing of the summer night's sands, to dip up the silver slivers of minnows and young smelt and swallow them by the light of the moon. The marsh hen belongs to the bittern tribe, but he is shorter-legged, less fishy in taste, and plump as a milk-fed pullet. He is practically extinct now, partly because of the feasts of my childhood before game laws shook their heads.
Let me admit at once that this bird stew of my boyhood is as unattainable now as the manna and quail of the Desert of Sinai. For the laws have come down from Sinai, and most of the thin-legged tribe that found their tender way to transfiguration in our seaside stew are out of bounds for all cooks, taboo, in a closed season forever. Too bad, for plovers and sandpeeps (sandpipers to more ignorant coasts farther south), herons, and mash hens have the most delicate flesh and most pungent flavor of all flying things. They are protected now by law, but even so they are yearly diminishing on our coasts. It could not have been gunning that dooms them, any more than it could have been gunning that caused the disappearance of the wild pigeons that used to make twilights of American afternoons as they came over the sky by myriads. I think the reason is that mankind has become so sinful in these latter evil days that a flesh of innocence, too sweet and fine for his rough palate, is being withdrawn from his sorry world.
The Middle Ages and the Victorian Age fattened their marrow on such delectable as these waders. The medieval falcons brought the long-necked heron low, to be the kingpin feast, especially in the length of his neck, turned on the castle spit. And boys and men in my colthood went after plover and sandpeep and brought home boatloads of these stiver splinters of heaven from the marshes and coves. But in these iron years, the diminishing and unshot waders of the waves are rolling like the pearls of a broken chain off the earth.
Half the poetry of bird stew was the shooting of the game birds. We went at the flood of the tide, found a sunny spot in the deep grass of a shore or behind a warm September dune, and we lay at full length and rippling with excitement and let the azure tide bring into the range of our shotguns these things slim as dreams are.
There would be only pure sunlight and pearly mud and the whisper of wind in sedge or sand, and then suddenly the whole quiet day would whisper loud, and out of nowhere, down like flakes from the sun, would sweep hundreds on hundreds of plovers, spoonbills, or sandpeeps. They would darken the sea, then flash white as they turned all at once, at no signal, showing the snow of the undersides of their wings, wheel in a new direction, circle, and come back, swoop low, suddenly grow feet, tip the sand at the run, and then light on feet so delicate they were not really there, roll like feathery beads, and make sweet high sounds as light as their own bodies. We would tense up and take aim, wait until two score of the rolling beads came together from two directions, passing one another, then we would let go with both barrels. I, in my knee length pants, would be knocked end over end by my muzzle-loader, but rise bruised and exultant and run down to pick up my dead and wring the necks of my maimed.
It was cruel, I know. But there was bird stew ahead. I was hollow as a reed. I was a boy, merciless, hungry, and young. So were my uncles beside me, blowing the smoke From their barrels and telling me to look alive and pick up their birds, directing me just how to wring their lovely necks and bring the sandpeeps or plovers to them.
The survivors would take to the air and away. But in a few minutes another whisper would come down the wind, a vaster flock would swing on down, and a hundred more birds roll along the ribbon of the coming tide at the muzzles of our guns. Our guns would go off again as they bunched. And away I would leg it for new sinews of our bird stew.
When my uncles and I were loaded down by strings of small birds so we could barely waddle, we stumbled boatward with the kill and walked the meadows home, and threw down our bag and covered the farmhouse floor. We called to the womenfolks and girls. They came and plucked our birds. Masculine hands, even tough small boy hands, were too clumsy for such plucking of feathers like moonbeams. It took cousins of moonbeams to strip the feathers from these strands of moonlight. It took the women and girls hours. But they got the slim birds bare at the last. Maybe forty-fifty sandpeeps, only a bine to a bird. But oh, it was an Eden of a bite! The women cleaned them, cut off their heads and feet, breezed up the sprucewood fire in the kitchen stove, and heated the kettle. We, uncles and I, sat up and sniffed the air for the aroma of cooking, watered at the mouth, and waited.
The she-ones sautéed the birds in butter first, at the kettle's dry bottom, in new farm butter. Then they added wisps of baby onions—not more than two small innocents of onions to a half kettleful of waders. They let the onions crimp brown with the sizzling meat. Then they added water to cover all and brought the whole mess to a boil. After that, they rolled out flour dumplings, mixed from a pint of flour and a teaspoon of salt, to the thinness of the little waders' breastbones, put these rose leaves of flour in, one by delicate one. Fifteen minutes, then the kettle was set on the back cover of the stove to simmer slow for half an hour or a little longer.
Dinnertime came at last. We sat to our soup plates. We spooned the hot breasts of the birds to our lips, ran the fragile breastbones free of meat with our tongues, and swallowed what was swallowable. The leg and wing meat was cooked off the lacework of bones and had flaked itself up in the brown broth. We had to look alive for bones that might choke us, especially we boys. Very small bones did no harm to swallow. We were experts at separating meat from minute bones with our teeth and tongues. For we had all been trained for years to eat boiled alewives and blow out the lacework of their bones as we gulped down their flesh.
I don't know of any eating as delicate as bird stew. Over the years I can still taste it. It was like swallowing sunbeams.
You can get something of an approximation to that old bird stew of outs by cooking plump young quail or partridge the same way, in the same heavy iron kettle, with the same tissues of moonlight in translucent dumplings. But the effect will never be quite so fine, for these birds of my bird stew were saltwater-bred, fattened on minnows and infant smelt and baby herring. The romance of the sea was in them, the innocence of infants of the sea was in their bones, they were a symphony of bird and fish, neither wholly, but a transfiguration of both. The fish they ate were too young to be fishy and the birds too slender and alive ever to grow tough or fibrous.
But the mash hens topped the whole delicious tribe of waders. They were sheerly poetry on two slender legs.
The shooting of them was even more poetic. For these were waders of flood tide to be shot only by sunset, by moonlight, by starshine. We lay at our lengths to shoot them when the evening had stretched long shadows over the world, when the stars were winking into being, or when the moon was rising. We chalked the barrels of our guns along the sight-line and waited. We heard the low calls of the birds in the dark trees, heard the soft velvet of their wings overhead, We trembled, grew taut, and waited. We heard them light at the sea's edge, maybe, in the gloom, but saw no sign of them yet. We waited until one of the birds crossed the path of light made by a big low star, by the thin young moon at the west, or by the rising world of a full moon at the east. Wc saw a shadow cross the path of light. We fired, and the quiet vault of evening pealed around us, a score of mash hens screamed. We ran—that is, I ran. bayed on by my uncles' bird-hungry, throaty bellows—down to the rim of the tide. And there, if you were a good shot, or a good uncle of a shot, you found a thing like a flake of the moon or the tender part of a star lying in feathers, and you thought of home and supper.
Or maybe you were in a boar, backing water with your oars soundlessly, with an uncle to curse you softly if you made so much as a low splash, with a night sky under your boat as well as over your head, floating through a dream, between moonlit islands looming like ghosts, the strange, continuous rustic of tide all around, drifting out of moonlight into dark caverns of shadows under overarching spruces, through tunnels of trees. You heard the brush of wings overhead. You dropped your two oars, snatched your gun from the gunwale, your uncle and you reared up, drew a quick bead up along the line of chalk on your barrels at a vanishing strand of moonlight, let go, and heard ten later guns let go and echo and roll around a startled, still ocean world. And down from the boughs drifted the strand of moonbeam and plopped in the water by you or, if you were as expert as my Uncle Andrew was, into the boat at your toes.
Once when I shot under a vast hemlock in which 1 heard the rustle of night wings, something vast as a planet came down on me and half filled the dory. A beak large as a scimitar fastened itself into my astounded Uncle Andy's trouser leg. And there, between us as we floated out into the moonlight, was a dying bald eagle. His white shawl of a neck-ruff caught the moon, and his two eyes were like amber stars going out. I was sorry. So was my uncle, and his trousers. It was unlawful. It was unpatriotic. But an American eagle had no right to be acting like a shy mash hen. It was his fault. They had to take a reef in Uncle Andrew. They had to take seven stitches in his pants-leg.
The bird stew the mash hen made had more meat to it than any sandpeep stew. Yet it was as tender meat as that in the smallest and sweetest sandpeep. You cooked the mash hen in the same butter and same iron kettle of the pioneer age, surrounded by the same halos of dumplings and martyred onions. There was more to bite into when you ate him, with the taste of faraway tender onions, faraway moonlight, and faraway sea in your mouth.
Once I fell asleep before the mash hen stew simmering on the stove was done. I woke in an agony to find supper was over and all the eaters had gone to bed. It was like the evening at Waterloo for me. I could smell the savor of the lost supper all through the quiet, moonstruck house. I lay empty in an empty, still house, with such sorrow in me as only a boy of eight can know. I finally fell asleep, but it was with tears in my eyes.
But next morning—glory be!—my mother brought me out my bowl of bird stew. She had saved my bowl of it for me. My mother was a mother like that, always remembering even the smallest boy of us. I sailed into that stew. And wonder of wonders! my mother had saved me all the best tidbits, the liver and heart and gizzard, saved them away from under the mustaches of my uncles. They were all there. And miracle on miracle! that stew tasted a hundred times better, warmed up in this way in the morning, a hundred times sweeter than ever before. I never had known such a flavor and savor. It was the top of all my boyhood breakfasts. 1 did not know it clearly at the time, but I had stumbled upon the science of making even the finest bird stew better. Let it stand overnight, warm it up in the morning, and it gains a hundredfold in magic. Wild birds, like wild codfish and wilder lobster, grow geometrically in flavor when the stews they arc in are aged overnight.
You go get you some of this year's partridge and make a bird stew of them my way. They won't be so miraculous a dish as my boyhood's waders. But your stew will be a monument of happiness just the same.