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Cailles à la Lucullus
Ingredients.
Six or eight Quails, boned, which must be very carefully done.
Twelve Livers from Game or Chicken.
Three ounces of Bacon.
Only the ingredient list survives here; the method that would have followed in the original book is not on this page. What is given is enough to place the dish — boned quail with a liver-and-bacon forcemeat — but a cook working from it is reconstructing, not following.
- Boning the birdsThis is the hinge of the dish and the reason the original bothers to say it must be done carefully. Work from the back with a small sharp knife, keeping the skin unbroken, and leave the wing and drumstick bones in so the bird holds its shape once stuffed. A poulterer will do it to order if asked in advance.
- Sourcing quailBuy farmed quail; wild common quail is a protected species in Britain and is not sold. A dressed farmed bird runs 4-6 oz, so six to eight birds serve three or four people as an entrée, two per plate.
- Twelve liversTwelve chicken livers is roughly 10-14 oz. Game livers, if you have them, are smaller and stronger, so a mixed dozen may come to rather less. Trim out the green-stained parts and any connective threads before use.
- The baconThree ounces of bacon in a book of this period is likely to have been fatter and drier-cured than a modern supermarket rasher — nearer pancetta or salt pork. With the method missing, its role can only be inferred, but in a forcemeat of this kind it would be there as fat and seasoning rather than as a topping.
- What the forcemeat isLivers and bacon in this proportion is a classic gratin forcemeat: the bacon is rendered, the livers tossed in the hot fat for a minute or two until stiffened but still rosy inside, then the whole pounded and sieved, seasoned, and often bound with a little egg. Overcooking the livers at this stage gives a grainy, grey stuffing.
- Cooking the stuffed birdsThe original gives no method. Boned stuffed quail are commonly trussed or wrapped, browned, then finished in a hot oven; something like 425F for about 15 minutes suits birds of this size. Where the birds are stuffed with a liver forcemeat the stuffing should reach 165F.
- The Lucullus garnishIn the classical repertoire the name signals truffle, and often foie gras with it. If you are reconstructing the dish, a Madeira or truffle-scented demi-glace poured round is faithful to what the title promises.
Lucullus in a French menu is a boast about expense. Lucius Licinius Lucullus was a Roman general of the first century BC whose banquets became a byword for extravagance, and nineteenth-century chefs attached his name to garnishes built on truffles. Quail carried much the same message in a late-Victorian British kitchen: small, fiddly, expensive by the bird, and requiring the sort of knife work that advertised a trained cook rather than a plain one. The instruction that the boning "must be very carefully done" is aimed squarely at that reader. Why the page can consist of an ingredient list alone is another question: a truncated or continued page is as likely an explanation as any.