Quail Pie
After the quails have been cleaned, salt and pepper them and stuff with bread crumbs or oyster dressing, and stew a few minutes, keeping them well covered. Cover a dish with rich puff paste, put in your birds, sprinkle in some minced parsley and hard-boiled eggs cut up fine, also flakes of butter rolled in flour; add the gravy which the birds were stewed in; cover with paste and bake in a moderate oven about one hour. A little lemon juice is an addition to this pie.
A standing game pie of the sort that assumed a cook had a brace or two of small birds on hand and a pastry-lined dish waiting. The instructions are compressed but complete; the details below fill in what a 1900 cook took for granted.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. The pastry lid will take colour well before the hour is out, so tent it loosely with foil once it is golden.
- The birdsQuail today means farmed coturnix or bobwhite, roughly 4-5 oz dressed, two per person. Buy them whole and semi-boned if you can; whole birds in a pie make for awkward serving, and you can split them down the back or take out the breastbone before stewing.
- "Stew a few minutes" is the hingeThis is a par-cook to set the birds and build the gravy, not a full braise. Five to eight minutes in barely enough stock or water, tightly covered, is plenty. Quail is very lean and will be dry and stringy if it is cooked twice through.
- Oyster dressingBread crumbs, butter, a little onion and parsley, bound with chopped raw oysters and their liquor. Shucked oysters sold in tubs work; drain and reserve the liquor for the gravy.
- Rich puff pasteAn all-butter puff. A single sheet of good frozen puff pastry for the lid is a fair substitute, but line the dish with shortcrust rather than puff -- a puff bottom under wet gravy goes to paste. Cut a vent in the lid or the filling will lift it.
- Butter rolled in flourFlakes of soft butter dredged in flour, working in much the same way as a beurre manie (equal weights butter and flour); about 1 tbsp of each is enough here. It thickens the gravy as the pie bakes, so the stewing liquid should go in thin.
- Gravy quantityAdd only enough to come partway up the birds, about a cup for a 9-inch dish. Filled to the brim it will boil over and soften the crust from beneath.
- Lemon and eggsTwo hard-boiled eggs, chopped, and the juice of half a lemon for a pie of six to eight birds. The acid matters more than the recipe lets on; it cuts the richness of the puff paste and the butter.
- YieldA deep 9- or 10-inch dish, six to eight quail, serving four. Rest it 15 minutes before cutting so the gravy sets enough to hold on a plate.
Quail pie belongs to the long English game-pie tradition that American cookbooks inherited wholesale, and it survived in print into the twentieth century partly because small wild birds were still an ordinary market commodity. Through the nineteenth century bobwhite quail, plover, snipe and other small wild birds were shot commercially and sold by the dozen in city markets, which is why a household book could casually assume a cook had six or eight birds to hand. That trade was brought to an end largely by state game laws banning the sale of wild game, with the federal Lacey Act of 1900 in support, after which recipes like this one increasingly described something a hunter brought home rather than something bought. The oyster dressing is a period marker of its own: oysters were cheap and abundant and were used as a general savoury seasoning -- in stuffings, sauces and pies -- in a way that reads as luxurious now and read as thrifty then.