Quail on Toast
Split the bird down the back; clean nicely, wash well, and wipe very dry, salt and pepper them and dredge with flour; pound down the breast bone so as it will lie flat, place in a buttered pan closely covered, with a little hot water, and roast until nearly done; then heat some butter in a spider and fry each piece a nice brown Have the toast well buttered, and laid upon a platter. Place a quail upon each piece of toast. Thicken the sauce and pour over the quails.
A two-stage method: the birds are half-braised under cover, then finished in butter for colour, and the pan liquid becomes the sauce. Most of what the original leaves out is temperature and time.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed for hearth cooking. Any heavy skillet does the job; the point is enough retained heat to brown the birds quickly without steaming them.
- Oven heatNo temperature or time is given, and the recipe uses no oven term ("moderate", "quick") that could be converted. A covered pan with a little water is a gentle, steamy environment; judge "nearly done" by the birds rather than the clock, remembering that quail are small and cook fast.
- DonenessCook the birds to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh. Quail dry out fast past that point, and the second stage in butter will add a little more heat.
- Splitting and flatteningSplitting down the back and pressing the breastbone flat is spatchcocking. It matters here because it lets the whole bird sit against the pan and cook evenly, and it makes the finished quail sit flat on its toast.
- DredgingFlour the birds just before they go into the pan. Flour left sitting on damp poultry turns to paste and will not brown; the instruction to wipe very dry is doing real work.
- The sauce"Thicken the sauce" means the pan liquid plus the flour that has come off the birds. A small beurre manie, or a teaspoon of flour worked into butter and whisked in, will bring it together. Season it after thickening, since the birds were already salted.
- ToastUse a firm, close-crumbed white bread cut thick and toasted hard. The toast is a sop for the sauce and will collapse into mush if it is soft to begin with.
- Wild birds and shotIf the quail are shot rather than farmed, check the breast and thighs for pellets before cooking. Farmed quail run about 4 to 6 oz dressed.
- YieldAllow two birds per person as a main course, one as a first course or supper dish.
Quail on toast belongs to a whole family of American nineteenth-century small-game dishes -- snipe, woodcock, reed birds, plover -- all served the same way, whole or split on a buttered slab of toast that caught the juices. The toast, on this way of thinking, was less garnish than the point of the plate. By the time this book appeared, wild quail were still shot in quantity across the eastern and southern states and sold through city markets. Market hunting of wild birds was curtailed in the United States in the early twentieth century, and quail eaten today is generally said to be farmed bobwhite or coturnix; the technique here, half-roast under cover then brown in butter, transfers to them without change.