Roast Quails
Pluck and dress like chickens, wipe clean, and rub both inside and out with salt and pepper; stuff with any good dressing, and sew up with fine thread; spread with butter and place in an oven with a good steady heat, turning and basting often with hot water seasoned with butter, salt and pepper; bake three-quarters of an hour. When about half done add a little hot water to the pan, and it is well to place a dripping-pan over them to prevent browning too much. Add to the gravy, flour and butter rubbed together, and water if needed.
A straightforward game roast from an era when quail arrived whole from the market, feathers on. The main adjustment is time: 45 minutes will dry out a modern farmed quail well past pleasure.
- The timing is the hingeA dressed quail weighs 4-6 oz. At 425F it is done in 18-25 minutes, breast at 160-165F. The book's three-quarters of an hour belongs to an oven whose heat could not be set or held steady; follow the thermometer, not the clock.
- "A good steady heat"The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven 425F suits these birds. Quail need heat brisk enough to color the skin before the meat overcooks. A slower oven simply dries them.
- Sourcing the birdsWild-caught bobwhite cannot legally be sold in the United States; farm-raised quail, usually coturnix but sometimes bobwhite, are sold frozen at butchers and Asian groceries, often semi-boneless. The recipe gives no number of birds; plan two per person as a main course.
- Basting liquidHot water with butter, salt and pepper is a thin, self-made basting sauce; melted butter alone works as well and browns better. Baste every 7-8 minutes rather than "often," since each opening of the oven drops the temperature.
- The dripping-pan over themThis is a shield, not a lid: an inverted shallow pan set over the birds partway through to block direct top heat. A loose tent of foil does the same job.
- Stuffing"Any good dressing" means a bread stuffing. Packed into a bird this small it will not reach a safe temperature in the time the meat needs, so bake the dressing separately in a dish and serve alongside, or stuff loosely with aromatics only o slemon wedge, thyme, a shallot.
- Sewing upFine thread through the vent still works, but a short skewer or a loop of twine around the legs is faster and easier to remove at the table.
- The gravyFlour and butter rubbed together is a raw beurre manie. Whisk it into the simmering pan juices in small pinches and cook two or three minutes so the flour loses its pastiness; add water or stock to thin. Drippings from a few small birds yield only a little gravy.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville and Minneapolis) was compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, and its Game section reflects a period when wild birds were an ordinary market commodity rather than a sportsman's private trophy. Quail—in most of the eastern United States the northern bobwhite—came to city stalls by the barrel in autumn and winter, cheap enough that recipe books treated them as everyday roasting fare. That trade did not last: unregulated market hunting was one pressure among several, habitat change not least, on quail and other game bird populations, and by the 1900s and 1910s state and federal law had ended the commercial sale of wild game.