By Justin Isherwood

The Last Supper has a kind of ardent charm over Western Civilization.  Seems like even the condemned get steak if they want, though if we’re going to pout about the electric chair, maybe medium rare isn’t the entrée you want to see.

Francois Mitterrand’s famous last meal was of an ortolan bunting, a bird about the size of a man’s thumb.  Petite by most metrics and not exactly what we think of as a game bird.  Mitterrand died ten days later, not eating during the interim.  Michael Paterniti wrote up the episode of Mitterrand’s last supper for Esquire magazine.  To mention the ortolan bunting is, and was, on the endangered species list, and so was Mitterrand.

Ambelopoulie is a historic traditional dish along the Mediterranean coast, what are now appropriately enough outlaw meals.  The supper fare is song birds, particularly during the fall migration when passerines number in the millions and pass through particular choke points along the Mediterranean coast .  The island of Cyprus is one such point of the European migration route, and one of the last strongholds of the illegal delicacy called ambelopoulie, the word from the Greek.  Where certain Cyprus restaurants, with a word and wink, the waiter will deliver a meal of a dozen song birds fried in olive oil. The cost?  about $100 per plate.

This rare dining experience is carried out mafia-style, including Black Ops enforcement and silence.  A trade worth some 5 million annually to Cyprus restaurateurs.  An estimated 2 million song birds are captured by mist nets, glue sticks and bird lime.  The modern poacher uses glue sticks that often affix the birds so securely their legs pull off when they are removed.  Mist nets are strung for hundreds of yads between trees, to catch thousands of birds per night.  The average ambelopoulie meal is a dozen birds.  By comparison Mitterrand’s last supper of one bird seems remarkably restrained.  This supper comes with its share of delicate techniques that call for the bird to be drowned in Armagnac, fresh plucked, cooked whole and served skewered, head, guts, bones and all.  The gastronome by tradition eats this morsel slowly with his/her head covered by a large white table napkin.  To this head-covering tradition two theories apply.  The hood, to better hold in the savory flavor of the bird.  The alternate being the act is so heinous the hood is to hide the perp from God in this act of cruelty to Genesis.  It is reported Francois Mitterrand also covered his head as he ate his last supper of crisp fried bunting.

A recipe (for sparrows) is as follows, about 8 in number, plucked, skin wiped with a cloth, rubbed with salt, intestines intact.

Tablespoon of olive oil

Malten salt

Lemon zest

Soft butter

The Marinade is the juice of six lemons

2 cloves garlic, chopped,

4 Tbsp honey

tsp cider vinegar

Salt

Black pepper

Fine chopped parsley

Fresh thyme

In Tupperware coat birds and leave to marinate overnight.  To cook, skewer each bird with a long swizzle-stick, passing through the anus till just short of the head, rub with soft butter.  In a hot oil pan, lay the skewered birds, with the skewers resting on the edge of the pan, fry till crisp.  Some prefer the birds closer to charred.

Like all exotica, some things that shouldn’t exist for good and gentle reasons, continue to exist.  Tourists, gourmands, thrill-seekers dine on sea turtles and puffin eggs, myself I’ve never understood veal.  Squab as I remember my Boy Scout era is quite nice.  I’ve heard well of mourning dove, meadow lark, sandhill crane and passenger pigeon.  To wonder here as an eco-friendly farmer might, if we could but connive a bon-appetite conspiracy, a Julie-Child intrigue, to incult to cuisine the grasshopper, the roach, the English sparrow, and please please the Colorado potato beetle for some kind of stir-fry ebullience.

To think any average farmkid could franchise this business, including the napkin over the head as adds kink.  English sparrows are of course all free-range and open-pastured, only to add organic cornmeal and a Boy Scout Patrol armed with a Red Ryder.  Hand-plucked of course.  The feathers sold to earnest fly fishermen.  What’s a good March Dun without the plumage of the nut-brown sparrow.

What better capitalistic end, a string of up-scale franchises, rather like McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried, except sparrows served on a skewer, piping hot.  Real connoisseurs will bite off the head and eat it crunchy and well-done, like French fries.  Something here along the lines of Marshal McLuhan, there is a message in a meal when you can crush the bones in your teeth.  As F. Mitterrand crushed the skull of that bunting he surely thought of his own existence coming to an end.  At least I hope so.

With my apologies to the Aldo Leopold Chapter of the Audubon Society, I think we might nicely counterfeit this whole business.  As we know, to franchise anything is to court natural disaster, to pity even the English sparrow at the will of soulless capitalism.  To believe here some chicken skin, a construct of bones and twigs with soy meal would suffice, a counterfeit bunting, skewered, a close facsimile, even to add some tiny drumsticks and a bit of sand grit for the crop.  For the skull a peanut shell ought work, same textural  crunch.  Served with blanched asparagus, a cold Rhine, chased down at last with Napoleon.  Of course with that napkin over your head.  And may God and the ghost of James Audubon please save the world’s birds from haute cuisine.