Quails
Quails are dressed like patridges, with the exception that instead of larding you may skewer a thin slice of pork to the breast, allowing it to cover the whole breast. Roast over a good fire twenty minutes; serve with apple sauce and toast.
A barding-and-roasting instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you have already read the partridge entry and know how to pluck, draw and truss a small bird. The essentials translate directly to an oven.
- "Dressed like partridges"In this period dressing means plucking, drawing, singeing off the pinfeathers and trussing the legs against the body, not seasoning. Quail are usually sold ready for the oven now, so the step disappears.
- Barding instead of lardingLarding threads strips of fat pork through lean flesh with a needle; here you simply lay a thin sheet of fatty pork over the breast and pin it. Use a slice of pork back fat, salt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon, and remove it for the last few minutes if you want the skin coloured.
- "A good fire" means high heatThe original assumes roasting close to a briskly burning fire, on a spit or before a tin reflector. The book gives no oven temperature; a hot oven of roughly 425-450F, with the birds on a rack over a shallow pan, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Twenty minutes is about right, but checkFarmed quail of 4 to 5 oz need roughly 12 to 15 minutes at 450F; larger or wild birds run closer to the full twenty. Pull them when the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F -- quail are small enough that a few extra minutes turns the breast dry and livery.
- Rest before servingFive minutes under loose foil. The barding fat keeps the breast moist during roasting, but the juices still need time to settle.
- YieldTwo birds per person for a main course, one as a first course. A quail carries very little meat on the leg.
- Apple sauce and toastToast was commonly served under small roast birds to soak up the drippings, though this recipe says only to serve it alongside. Plain unsweetened apple sauce, the same accompaniment given to pork and goose, cuts the fat of the barding.
- If the birds are wild-shotFeel carefully for shot pellets before serving, and be aware that lead shot fragments spread well beyond the visible pellet. Commercially farmed quail carry no such risk.
Quail was ordinary market game in nineteenth-century America, sold by the dozen in city stalls alongside snipe, plover and partridge, and cheap enough to appear in household manuals without ceremony. The bird generally meant here is the northern bobwhite, which American cooks and sportsmen have long called quail in the North and partridge in the South -- a confusion the recipe's own opening line quietly rests on. Barding a lean bird with pork rather than larding it is the shortcut of a kitchen without a larding needle. Market hunting on this scale collapsed in the early twentieth century, and the quail on sale today are farmed.