Quail Pies
6 quails 6 slices carrot Stalk of celery 2 slices onion Sprig of parsley Bit of bay leaf 1/4 teaspoon peppercorns Flour Salt and pepper Sherry wine Remove breasts and legs from birds, season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and saute in butter. To butter in pan add vegetables and peppercorns, and cook five minutes. Separate backs of birds in pieces, cover with cold water, add vegetables, and cook slowly one hour. Drain stock from vegetables, and thicken with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Season with salt, pepper and wine. If not rich enough, add more butter. Allow one bird to each individual dish, sauce to make sufficiently moist, and cover with plain or puff paste, in which make two incisions, through which the legs of the bird should extend.
An individual pot pie built around a single quail, with the leg bones deliberately pushed through the crust as a garnish. The original assumes you know the oven, so start there.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake the assembled pies at 425F until the pastry is risen and browned, roughly 20-25 minutes for puff paste; the filling only needs to be hot through, since the meat is already sauteed and the sauce cooked.
- Quail sizeFarmed quail run 4-6 oz dressed, so one bird per person is a first course rather than a dinner. Six pies serve six as an entree course in the older sense. Semi-boneless quail are common now and make the jointing step easier.
- Jointing the birdsCut off the two breast halves with the wing joint attached and the two legs, then chop the backs, ribs and necks for the stock. Six backs will not give much liquid, so cover with only enough cold water to submerge, about 3 cups, or the stock will be thin.
- Saute, don't cook throughThe breasts and legs go into the oven again inside the pie. Brown them in butter for two or three minutes a side and no more; quail breast is lean and dries to cotton if cooked twice at length.
- The vegetables do double dutyThey are sweated in the same butter, then transferred to the stock pot. Six slices of carrot, two of onion, a celery stalk, parsley and a fragment of bay leaf are a modest aromatic load for 3 cups of liquid, which is right: the sauce should taste of the bird.
- ThickeningFlour slaked in cold water is a whitewash rather than a roux, and it needs a full two or three minutes at a simmer to lose its raw taste. For a sauce that clings without setting, allow about 1 tablespoon flour per cup of strained stock.
- SherryNo quantity is given. A tablespoon or two of dry sherry per cup of sauce is in keeping; add it off the heat so the aroma survives.
- The legs through the crustCut the two slits before laying the pastry over the dish, position the legs upright in the filling, then draw the bones through and press the pastry around them. Brush with egg wash, and if the exposed bone ends threaten to scorch, cap them with a scrap of foil.