Select fat quails. Rub with salt, pepper and butter and tie a very thin strip of bacon around the body of each quail. Place on a broiler over a slow fire; let broil twenty minutes until done. Remove the bacon. Have ready buttered toast. Place the birds on the toast, pour over some melted butter, chopped parsley and lemon-juice. Serve hot.
A simple barded-and-grilled game bird. The one thing to fix is the timing: twenty minutes over a slow fire will dry out a modern farmed quail long before the bacon has done its job.
- TimingFarmed quail weigh 4-6 oz dressed and cook in 8-12 minutes total, turning once. Pull them at 160-165F in the thigh; the breast should still be faintly pink. Twenty minutes gives you the livery, cottony texture people blame on game itself.
- "Broiler over a slow fire"This means a gridiron set above settled coals, not a modern overhead element. Charcoal burned down to grey ash, or a gas grill on medium, is the closest match. An oven broiler works but set the birds 5-6 inches from the element so the bacon renders instead of scorching.
- The baconBacon of the period was often cut thicker and fattier than standard supermarket slices, though this recipe specifically calls for a very thin strip. Use one thin rasher per bird, tied with kitchen twine, and remove it as instructed — it is there to baste rather than to be served with the bird. Streaky bacon or a thin sheet of pork fatback both work; avoid heavily smoked or sugar-cured bacon, which burns.
- ButterflyingThe recipe assumes whole birds, which cook unevenly on a grate. Splitting each quail down the backbone and pressing it flat gives you even contact and cuts the time further, to roughly 6-8 minutes.
- "Select fat quails"Quail were a game-dealer bird, typically sold undrawn. Today buy semi-boneless or whole farmed quail, fresh or frozen; two per person is a portion, one if it opens a larger meal.
- Salt and the rubSalt the birds 30-45 minutes ahead rather than immediately before grilling, then rub with softened butter and pepper. Butter on the skin will smoke over live coals, so keep the layer thin.
- The finishing sauceMelted butter, chopped parsley and lemon juice, poured over at the table, is a simple maître d'hôtel dressing. Whisk the lemon into warm rather than hot butter so it holds together, and be sparing — about a tablespoon of butter per bird.
- The toastCut it thick enough to absorb the juices without collapsing, butter it while hot, and set it under the birds as they rest for two or three minutes. That resting drip is half the point of serving game on toast.
Quail on toast was one of the standard small-game dishes of the European and American table in the nineteenth century, when wild birds were sold by the brace in city markets and needed no more treatment than fat, fire and lemon. The Belgian attribution in this day-a-page collection is loose "American cookbooks of the period — but Belgium and northern France were genuinely quail country, with the birds netted or shot on migration and barded with lard as here. Barding with bacon or pork fat was the necessary trick: quail go dry within minutes of cooking, so the strip was tied on to baste the breast and then removed before serving so it would not mask the flavour. Books like this one, which pair a nation with each date of the year, reflect an era when American home cooks were being taught to think of dinner as a tour of European capitals; the shift to farmed quail is the main reason the timings no longer hold.