Quail on Toast
Dry-pick them, singe them with paper, cut off heads, and legs at first joint, draw, split down the back, soak in salt and water for five or ten minutes, drain and dry with a cloth, lard them with bacon or butter, and rub salt over them, place on broiler and turn often, dipping two or three times into melted butter; broil about twenty minutes. Have ready as many slices of buttered toast as there are birds, and serve a bird, breast upward, on each slice. -Mrs. Emma L. Fay.
A gridiron recipe from a time when quail arrived from the field whole and unplucked. Most of the labor described is now done for you; what remains is a lesson in not overcooking a very small bird.
- The twenty minutes is the problemA butterflied quail weighing 4-6 oz cooks through in 6-10 minutes total over direct heat, turned every couple of minutes. Twenty minutes leaves it dry and livery. Cook to about 165F at the thigh; the breast may stay faintly rosy.
- "Broiler" means a gridironIn 1877 this was a hinged wire or iron grid set over live coals, hence the constant turning. A charcoal or gas grill is the closest match. Under a modern overhead broiler, set the birds 4-5 inches from the element, skin side down first, and turn once.
- Dry-picking and singeingSkip it. Buy quail already dressed, whole or semi-boneless; farmed quail is widely sold frozen. If yours arrive with pinfeathers, a quick pass over a gas flame does what the burning paper did.
- "Draw, split down the back"Remove the innards, then cut through the backbone with shears and press the bird flat. Spatchcocking is what makes the short cooking time possible, so do not skip it.
- The salt soakFive to ten minutes in cold salted water would have worked as a rinse and, incidentally, as a very light brine. It does no harm; a dry sprinkle of salt half an hour ahead does more.
- "Lard them with bacon or butter"Quail has almost no fat. Either drape a thin bacon slice over each breast or, as the recipe goes on to say, dip the birds in melted butter two or three times during cooking. Both work; doing both is not excessive.
- The toast is functionalIt catches the butter and juices, so use a sturdy bread cut thick, toasted dry, then buttered while hot. Serve the bird breast upward as instructed and the drippings go where they are wanted.
- YieldOne bird per slice of toast, and two birds per person for a main course.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and its treatment of game reflects a Midwestern table where bobwhite quail, prairie chicken and wild pigeon were seasonal groceries rather than luxuries; a section that opens with instructions for dry-picking assumes birds coming in from a morning's shooting, not from a market. Quail on toast was nonetheless also a restaurant and hotel dish of the same decades, and appears on American menus of the 1870s and 1880s as one of the standard small-game orders. Those wild supplies eventually collapsed, under pressures generally traced to market hunting and to habitat change, and much of the quail sold in the United States today is farmed, milder and more uniform than the wild bobwhite Mrs. Fay would have handled. The recipe's reliance on butter dips and bacon points to the same fact that governs quail cookery now: the bird is too lean and too small to survive slow cooking.