Eggsacting research

The eggs of wild birds were once considered expensive delicacies — but did their flavour really justify their price, muses John Wright

- John Wright

He was alone when I first came, peeling a plover’s egg taken from the large nest of moss in the centre of his table.” With this memorable line, Evelyn Waugh reveals much about Brideshead and Sebastian — nobility, money, opulence and a sensibility of taste beyond that of the common man. Plovers’ eggs say it all.

Times have changed, and anyone now wishing to make so grand an impression will need to look elsewhere: plovers’ eggs and almost all wild birds’ eggs are off the menu.

Exceptional numbers

Though it is likely that Sebastian’s eggs would have been procured from the Brideshead estate, had they been bought they would have set the Marchmain household back a bob or two. In 1846 they were sold at market for ‘one and six’ per dozen, equivalent to £1.40 each. By 1915 they were forecast to sell at 30 shillings a dozen, about £13 each. This price may have come down, however, as it promised to be a good year for eggs because exceptional numbers of birds were fleeing from Europe to escape the guns.

Many readers will know that the bird in question was not the golden, ring or grey plover, but the lapwing, a bird that is plover in all but name, though sometimes called the green plover. Any such confusion is mild compared to that of what, precisely, ended up on the plates of the well-heeled. Endless species were passed off as plovers’ eggs.

Gull and rook eggs were among them and, fortuitously for the innocent buyer, the superior eggs of the golden plover. Collecting eggs was a highly lucrative sideline for country lads traversing the freshly ploughed fields in spring, so substituting a lookalike made good sense.