Leipziger Laerche
(Leipzig's Lark). A lark is not always a lark and sometimes birds turn into cakes.
Game birds have always been considered a delicacy from European gourmets: grouse, partridge and woodcock are among the many prized ingredients of old game recipes. Yet you'll have to look hard to find similar recipes today. Hunting is today often seen as an unnecessary cruelty, we've plenty of other meats to choose from and supply is becoming scarcer and scarcer, not last because of the massive ecological "changes" (disasters might not be amiss here) Europe has gone through.
The hunting of some birds has been prohibited in the recent past to avoid the extinction of a number of endangered species. Today the fabled Ortolan, along with its somewhat gruesome eating ceremony, is a forbidden morsel few rich gourmets manage to taste, and maybe it is better that way. Even the more modest polenta e osei, polenta with birds from Veneto, has become a rare delicacy and has been adapted to become polenta e osei scampà, polenta with runaway birds, which substitutes lard wrapped meat, sausage or even liver for the birds. Keeping these facts in mind, I always thought animal preservation movements were a phenomenon of the last forty years. I was dead wrong. Leipziger Laerche, a pastry speciality from the town of Leipzig, has its roots in a law passed in 1876 to stop the hunting of the local larks.
During the XVIII century larks were a famous delicacy in Leipzig and throughout Saxony, the kingdom to which the city belonged at the time. The birds would be caught by the thousands, becoming so popular they reached markets as far away as Spain and Russia. Reports of the time indicate that more than 400 thousand larks were caught only in the month of October 1720. The Saxon cookbooks of the time suggested to cook the birds whole on the spit or used the breasts to prepare a special truffled delicacy. This state of affairs went on until the 1876 law prohibiting the hunting of the larks was approved by the Saxon king. The main reason for this was the lobbying of the animal friends of the time. And I thought the Californian Foie Gras law was something new!
At about the same time, a smart baker took his chance and created a new confection, the Leipziger Laerche, to please the bird-deprived gourmets. A marzipan filled cake decorated with two strips of dough crossing each other to remember the shape of the flying birds. Last Christmas we received one of these delicious cakes as a present from a couple of friends, coming directly from one of Leipzig's best pastry shops, Corso. Leipziger Laerche is really heaven if you love marzipan: a buttery shortcut pastry shell enclosing a filling of moist aromatic marzipan with just a trace of strawberry jam. Not something to eat in one bit, rather to nibble upon, a little slice at a time. Our cake even had an extra marzipan bird on top of that. . . just to be sure you don't miss the connection with history.
I haven't tried baking these yet, but they seem quite simple. If you're interested there's a detailed recipe in German here (with two anti-hunting texts of the XIX century enclosed aafter the recipe itself), or a somewhat simpler one in English here. (The main difference between the German and the English one is that the former adds some strawberry or raspberry jam at the bottom of the pastry shell before the marzipan addition.)
In German it is called Leipziger Lerche like the bird. The tree (Larix europaea) is called Laerche.
Posted by: M. Neumann | September 20, 2006 at 08:45 AM