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Nutmeg and Saffron
A tablespoonful of Tomato Sauce.
Two ounces of Butter.
Cooked Rice (a tablespoonful to each quail).
One gill of White Stock.
Put the quails into a stewpan with the butter, and let them cook gently; then add a little chopped onion, the cooked rice, salt, pepper, nutmeg, a little saffron, the tomato sauce and stock. Let this all cook gently together for about half an hour. Dish the quails up on the rice, and serve very hot.
Carré d'Agneau, froid à la Bohémienne. (Cold Neck of Lamb.) Ingredients.
A neck of Lamb.
A gentle stew of quail finished on rice, tinted and scented with saffron and nutmeg. The quantities given are for a small number of birds, and the seasoning is the whole point of the dish.
- Quantity of birdsThe ingredient list as printed gives the sauce, butter, rice and stock but not a number of quail. The rice line — a tablespoonful of cooked rice per bird — suggests a small dish; the butter and stock would perhaps suit four birds, which would mean about four tablespoonfuls, some two ounces, of cooked rice, though the recipe itself does not say.
- A gillAn Imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so a scant two-thirds of a cup. American books of the same era often use the 4 fl oz half-cup gill; either works here, since the stock is only there to moisten.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock of veal or chicken bones with no browning. A light chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the saffron colour.
- Saffron and nutmeg"A little saffron" means a good pinch of threads, warmed in a spoonful of the hot stock before it goes in so the colour spreads. Nutmeg should be grated fresh and kept to a few rasps — it turns bitter and soapy in quantity.
- TimingHalf an hour of gentle cooking is longer than modern practice wants for quail, which are small and lean and dry out quickly. Fifteen to eighteen minutes at a bare simmer, covered, brings the leg joints loose and keeps the breast juicy; if you want the sauce reduced further, lift the birds out and boil it down separately.
- The tomato sauceIn a book of this vintage this is a cooked, sieved sauce in the classical manner, not ketchup. A tablespoon of passata or a thick tomato purée loosened with stock gives the same effect: acidity and a little body, not tomato flavour in the foreground.
- AssemblyThe rice cooks in the pan with the birds and takes up the saffron liquid, so start with rice that is already cooked and on the firm side — freshly boiled, still slightly underdone — or it will collapse. Bed the rice on the serving dish and set the quail on top.
- ServingReckoning on four birds, the dish serves two as a main course or four as a first course. It must go to table very hot; the butter in the sauce sets dull and greasy as it cools.
Saffron and nutmeg together are an old pairing in European cookery, and a saffron-tinted rice under small birds was often given an Italian name on late nineteenth-century menus, Milanese most commonly. Quail were relatively plentiful in the period these high-class cookery books were written for: they arrived in Britain in numbers as imports, and birds were often fattened in captivity before sale; they turn up constantly as an elegant small entr e, one or two to a plate. Nutmeg in a savoury stew looks odd to modern eyes but was ordinary then or meat and forcemeat since the later Middle Ages and only gradually retreated into the pudding and custard corner of the kitchen.