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Quails, Salmi Of
Truss the quails as for roasting, and put a small roll of bacon inside each. Put two ounces of butter in a frying-pan, and when it melts put the quails in and let them colour nicely. Next, turn them into a stewpan, cover with a rich gravy, and stew until tender; take them out, thicken and colour the gravy; add half a wine-glassful of Madeira, the pounded livers of the birds, a table-spoonful of chutney, a dash of tarragon vinegar, and a few finely-minced mushrooms. Heat the birds up in this sauce, and serve with chicken salad.
A late-Victorian salmi: the birds are browned, stewed, then finished in a reduced sauce sharpened with Madeira, chutney and vinegar. The one thing to watch is the stewing — quail are small and very lean, and "stew until tender" invites you to cook them to shreds.
- Don't overstewFarmed quail need roughly 12-18 minutes gently simmered in the gravy after browning, not the 45 minutes a tougher bird would take. The legs should give easily; past that the breast turns dry and stringy no matter how good the sauce is.
- Half a wine-glassfulA Victorian wine glass held about 2 fl oz, so this is roughly 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons, of Madeira. Use a dry or medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho) rather than a sweet one, since the chutney already brings sugar.
- "A rich gravy"In Victorian usage this generally implies a strong, well-reduced brown stock rather than pan drippings. A good veal or chicken stock reduced by half, or a light demi-glace thinned with stock, gives the body the recipe assumes.
- The liversQuail livers weigh almost nothing, and birds sold today usually come without them. Two chicken livers, sautéed briefly then mashed to a paste and whisked into the hot sauce off the boil, do the same job of thickening and enriching. Do not let the sauce boil after they go in or it will turn grainy.
- ChutneyRead this as the bottled sweet-sour spiced Anglo-Indian mango chutney of the period. Chop any large fruit pieces before adding so the sauce stays smooth.
- The bacon rollA thin rasher rolled and tucked into the cavity bastes the bird from inside. Use streaky bacon or pancetta; modern back bacon is too lean to render usefully.
- Thicken and colour"Colour" here means a few drops of browning or a spoonful of caramel for appearance. Reduction and the liver paste will do the work; skip the colouring unless you want the dark Victorian gloss.
- YieldTwo quail per person as a main course, one as a starter. The recipe gives no bird count; two ounces of butter will brown several birds if you work in batches.
A salmi (French salmis) is a two-stage treatment for game: the bird is part-roasted or browned, then finished in a sauce built on its own trimmings and offal, traditionally the liver pounded to a paste. It belonged to the elaborate end of the nineteenth-century dinner, where a small bird arrived after the roast and before the sweets, and it appears in Cassell's alongside other quail preparations because quail were then plentiful — netted in enormous numbers on the Mediterranean migration routes and shipped live to London poulterers in cages, to be fattened before sale. That trade collapsed in the twentieth century, and the quail sold now are farmed, tamer in flavour and slightly larger in the breast. The chutney and tarragon vinegar are less telling than they look: Anglo-Indian bottled relishes were an English pantry staple well before the end of the century, and cooks reached for them for sweetness and edge at the last moment.