Broiled Quail
Split through the back and broil over a hot fire, basting frequently with butter. When done place a bit of butter on each piece, and set in oven a few moments to brown. Serve on pieces of toast with currant jelly. Plovers are cooked in the same way. Pigeons should be first parboiled and then broiled.
A game-bird recipe from a period when quail arrived from the market by the dozen. It works as written on a modern grill or broiler, with a few adjustments to timing and one bird on the list you should skip.
- Split through the backThis is spatchcocking: cut down either side of the backbone or straight through it, then press the bird flat so it cooks evenly. Flattened quail sit close to the heat and cook in minutes rather than roasting unevenly on the bone.
- A hot fireDirect high heat -- hot coals, or a broiler element with the rack 3-4 inches below. Quail are small enough that anything gentler dries them out before the skin colours.
- TimingThe original gives none. Whole quail, split and flattened, need roughly 3-4 minutes a side. Breast meat is at its best just past pink, around 155-165F; pushed to well done it turns dry and livery.
- Basting with butterButter dripping onto coals causes flare-ups that will blacken the skin. Baste with clarified butter, or move the birds off direct heat for each basting and back on afterward.
- The finish in the oven"Set in oven a few moments to brown" gives no temperature; the book was written for ovens without gauges. On a modern oven a hot setting, roughly 425-450F, for a minute or two will melt and glaze the added butter. It is a finishing step, not further cooking.
- PloversDo not substitute them casually. North American plovers are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and cannot lawfully be taken or sold; in Europe the position varies, with some species (the golden plover among them) still legal quarry in certain countries. They were common market game in the 1870s. Check local law before considering any substitution.
- PigeonsThe parboiling instruction reflects tough older birds. Farmed squab sold today is young and tender; treat it like quail, allowing longer over the heat for the greater thickness, and skip the parboil.
- Toast and currant jellyThe toast is structural -- it catches the butter and juices, so use a sturdy bread cut thick. Red currant jelly is the traditional partner; a tart cranberry or sour cherry preserve serves the same purpose.
- YieldTwo quail per person as a main course, one as a first course. Allow one squab per person.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s, when wild game was still a market commodity rather than a delicacy: bobwhite quail, plover, prairie chicken and wild pigeon were shipped by the barrel to city butchers and hotels, which is why a household book of this kind could treat quail as casually as it treats chicken. The pairing with currant jelly is the standard nineteenth-century game accompaniment, inherited from English practice, where a sharp sweet preserve was thought to answer the strong flavour of wild flesh. The offhand line about plovers is the most telling part of the page -- shorebirds were an ordinary food then, and the market hunting that supplied recipes like this one is precisely what the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 were written to stop. The passenger pigeon, which "pigeons" in books of this era may occasionally have meant, though such books generally assumed domestic pigeons or squab, was extinct in the wild within a generation of this book's publication.