- Do you have questions about birds, bugs, bees, butterflies or other wildlife? Send your questions to Wild Things and we will try to find the answers.
It’s that time of year again: December, darkness, holiday lights, songs about partridges in pear trees and turtledoves and calling birds.
But what the heck are calling birds?
In the original 1780 published version of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the four birds were listed as four colly birds. Colly (coaly) refers to the color of coal, that is to say, black. In southwest England, colleybirds were none other than blackbirds. (The name for the collie dog also may derive from this meaning of colly.)
Giving someone four blackbirds may seem like an unusual gift, but people ate songbirds back then. They ate just about any kind of bird.
Blackbirds had entertainment value, too. You may have heard a nursery rhyme about 24 blackbirds in a pie:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye,
Four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.
Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before a king?
In the 1500s, as entertainment between courses at a fancy banquet (perhaps for a king), chefs really did serve pies with live birds inside. The birds flew out as the king cut open the pie.
Pies in those days were not the same as our modern pies. The crust was thick and dense, and hard to chew. People did not eat the crust. But the crust had a purpose – to preserve the food inside. In the days before refrigeration, thick pie crusts preserved food remarkably well. Most often pies were rectangular. The entire thing was called a coffin, because it was casket-shaped.
To make a live bird coffin, the baker lined a rectangular dish with thick pastry, putting a fist-sized hole in the bottom. He attached a top crust (called a lid) to complete the coffin. Then the baker cooked the coffin. After the coffin cooled, just before serving, the baker stuffed live birds inside the hole in the bottom of the coffin. As a diner pried off the lid of the coffin, the live birds flew out.
It wasn’t just live birds that creative chefs baked into pies; they enclosed frogs, rabbits and turtles inside coffins. A cookbook from the 1660s describes the effect:
Lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some Frogs, which makes the Ladies to skip and shreek; next after the other pie, whence comes out the Birds; who by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the candles; so that what with the flying Birds and skipping Frogs, the one above, the other beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company.
(I can think of some things about the release of live birds and frogs indoors at mealtime that would not be delightful and pleasurable, but times have changed, I guess.)
To indicate what type of pie a chef had created for a feast, the helpful baker might display the severed head or feet of the animal on top of the crust. This signaled to the diner what type of meat they would encounter as they removed the lid. Some popular types of pies were swan pies, capon (chicken) pies, beef tongue pies, lamprey (eel) pies, anchovy pies, carp pies, oyster pies, hare pies, pigeon pies, peacock pies, partridge pies, turkey pies, lark pies, veal pies and venison pies.
If the coffin was well constructed, the meat inside would keep for a long time. One manuscript from 1691 states that a turkey pie “will keepe for a quarter of a yeare without Moulding.” Claims for the longevity of other types of pies were similar.
In colonial America, wheat was difficult to come by, so pastry coffins became thinner and thinner as bakers stretched out the dough to conserve it. Americans adopted the word crust to refer to this thinner pastry shell. American bakers also began “cutting corners” – making round pies instead of rectangular coffins.
British pies retained the thicker, denser crust, however, and Mark Twain was not a fan. In his 1880 book “A Tramp Abroad,” he tells how to make an English pie:
Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. Work this into the form of a disk … Construct a cover for this redoubt in the same way and of the same material. Fill with stewed dried apples … then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.
Anyway, back to our four calling birds. The birds in the song may have been Eurasian blackbirds, a kind of thrush not found in North America. (The America robin is a related thrush that is found on our continent.) Even though these birds may seem too small to eat, it was common at the time to eat birds of any size. If it a bird could be caught, it could become a tasty morsel at mealtime.
But perhaps the birds in the song were not meant to be eaten. It was also common for women to keep native songbirds as pets (tropical birds did not survive English winters). The Eurasian blackbird does sing a beautiful song.
When you eat your holiday pies this year, thank American colonists for getting rid of the coffin. And thank modern sensibilities for leaving native songbirds where they belong – in the wild.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day, and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.