Home › Game › Trussing of Quail
Trussing of Quail
Pluck, draw, and singe the quail. Cut off the neck close to the back, and the wings at the first pinion. Truss the legs close to the body, and pass a skewer through the pinions and thighs.
A preparatory step rather than a finished dish: this is the butchery and trussing that comes before roasting, grilling or braising a quail. Almost all of it is done for you if you buy farmed birds.
- What "draw" meansTo draw a bird is to remove the entrails through the vent. Quail are small enough that the heart, liver and gizzard are worth keeping for the pan gravy; the intestines and gall bladder are not.
- SingeingAfter plucking there will be pin feathers and down that no amount of tweezing removes. A few seconds turning the bird over a gas flame or a lit alcohol burner takes them off. Wipe with a dry cloth afterwards.
- The pinionThe first pinion is the outermost wing joint, the thin section that carries the flight feathers and almost no meat. Cutting it off at the joint leaves the two useful wing segments attached.
- The skewer is the hingeOne thin metal skewer passed crosswise through both wing joints and both thighs holds the whole bird compact and flat-bottomed. Untrussed, the legs tend to splay in the heat and the bird cooks less evenly. Metal skewers, or a trussing needle and butcher's twine, stand up to a long roast better than wooden ones.
- Buying birds todaySupermarket and butcher quail are farmed coturnix, sold plucked and drawn, and sometimes semi-boneless. You may still want to truss them, and to remove the pinion if it has been left on. In most places taking wild birds requires a licence and an open season.
- Bard the breastQuail carries very little fat. Whatever recipe follows, a slice of bacon or salt pork tied over the breast, or a thorough brushing with butter, is what keeps it from drying.
- YieldFarmed quail run roughly 3 to 6 oz dressed. Allow two birds per person as a main course, one as a first course.
Trussing instructions like this one belong to a period when game arrived at the kitchen door in feather, not on a tray. American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries put quail among the most prized small game: in the eastern states the bird meant the bobwhite, sold by the brace in city markets during the autumn and winter season, while "quail" on a hotel menu might equally cover other small birds. Market hunting on that scale ended with state game laws and with the early twentieth-century restrictions on the commercial traffic in game, and the quail on a plate today is almost always the farmed Japanese coturnix. The technique itself is older than the book: passing a single skewer through wings and thighs to compact a small bird is standard European kitchen practice, and it survives wherever birds are still roasted whole.