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Quails, Roast
Draw the birds or not, according to taste. Truss them firmly, and tie over the breasts a vine-leaf covered with a slice of fat bacon. Roast before a clear fire, and baste well. When done enough brush the bacon over with glaze, and serve the birds on a hot dish; garnish with water-cress. Pour good brown gravy round but not over the quails. If the birds are not drawn before being roasted they should be served on a slice of toast, which has been placed in the pan under them to catch the trails. Time to roast the quails, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, when plentiful, 1s. each. Sufficient, two for a dish.
A spit-roasting recipe from the era when small game birds were cooked in front of the fire rather than in an oven. The method translates to a hot oven with almost no adjustment, provided the birds are barded as directed.
- The hinge: fat, not timeQuail has almost no fat and a thin skin, so the bacon-and-vine-leaf barding is the whole point of the recipe rather than decoration. Without it the breast dries out well before the legs are cooked.
- Oven equivalent"A clear fire" means high, direct, dry heat. Use 425F, on a rack in a shallow tin, and expect 12 to 18 minutes for modern farmed quail of 4 to 6 oz. Pull them at 160-165F in the thickest part of the thigh; the breast should still be faintly pink.
- BastingFire roasting turned the bird constantly, so basting kept the whole surface moist. In an oven, baste once at the halfway mark and turn the tin, and leave the birds otherwise undisturbed.
- Vine leavesFresh vine leaves are seasonal; brined ones sold for dolmades work, rinsed well and patted dry, or omit the leaf and use the bacon alone. The leaf contributes a faint tannic scent, not much more.
- Fat baconFat bacon here is best read as unsmoked streaky bacon or a thin sheet of pork back fat; a heavily smoked modern rasher risks overwhelming a bird this small. Ask a butcher for barding fat or use pancetta cut thin.
- GlazeVictorian glaze is meat stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets on cooling. A spoonful of reduced brown stock brushed on at the end does the same job.
- Drawn or undrawnSmall game birds were often roasted with the intestines in, the "trails" dripping onto toast set beneath. It is still done with woodcock and snipe, but the birds must be very fresh and it is a matter of taste. Farmed quail are usually sold already drawn, in which case the toast is optional.
- Yield and costThe recipe's "Sufficient, two for a dish" is usually read as two birds to a dish rather than two per head; two apiece suits a main course, one a first course. The shilling apiece is Victorian pricing and no guide to anything now.
- ServingThe gravy goes around the birds, not over them, so the glazed bacon and crisp skin stay dry. The watercress does more than decorate — its pepperiness works as a foil to the fat.
Cassell's puts quail among the small roasts that a Victorian kitchen treated in much the same way: ortolan, lark, snipe, woodcock and quail commonly arrived barded with fat, spitted, and served on toast or fried bread. Live wild quail were imported into Britain during the nineteenth century, a large share of them from Egypt and southern Europe and often fattened after arrival, which helps explain how the book can call them "plentiful" and quote a flat price per bird. That trade later declined as populations fell and protective legislation was introduced, and the quail sold today are farmed Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica), reliably tender and milder than the wild bird this recipe assumed. Serving small birds undrawn, with the trails caught on toast, is an older practice, sometimes explained on the grounds that birds feeding on clean seeds and berries needed no gutting — though that explanation is traditional rather than documented.