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One Shalot (About six slices of Bacon)
About six slices of Bacon.
Prepare the quails as for stuffing. Put the milk in a stewpan, add half an ounce of butter, a small bayleaf, salt, pepper, and a little grated nutmeg; when boiling stir in the breadcrumbs (about a handful). Simmer for ten minutes. Remove the bayleaf, and stir in the yolks of eggs. Cut up the chicken livers small, sauté them in butter in which a finely chopped shalot has been blended; season with pepper, salt, and aromatics, and rub the liver, etc., through a sieve. Mix the purée with the breadcrumbs, etc., and stuff the birds with this. Wrap each quail in a thin slice of bacon, place them in an earthenware pan (casserole) with the remainder of the butter, and cook over a slow fire for half an hour. Pour off the fat and finish cooking in the sauce (demi-glacé or Madeira).
A French-style entrée of boned-out quails stuffed with a liver-and-panada forcemeat, barded in bacon and pot-roasted. The written method survives intact; the quantities that belonged with it do not, so treat the amounts below as working proportions rather than the author's own.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe as printed gives no number of quails and no measures for the milk, breadcrumbs or eggs. For six slices of bacon, work on six quails, and for the panada allow roughly 150 ml (a scant 2/3 cup) milk to a generous handful of fresh breadcrumbs and two egg yolks; the mixture should be stiff enough to hold its shape on a spoon.
- "Casserole" means the panHere the earthenware casserole is used on direct heat, not in the oven: the recipe says to cook it "over a slow fire". A heavy enamelled cast-iron pan does the same job. "A slow fire" is the lowest steady heat that keeps the butter bubbling without colouring.
- Prepare as for stuffingAt minimum the birds are drawn and trussed so the cavity will take forcemeat; some kitchens boned them through the back or removed the ribcage and backbone. A butcher will bone them; otherwise stuff the body cavity of whole quails and secure with a cocktail stick.
- The panada is the hingeBreadcrumbs simmered in seasoned milk for ten minutes must be thick and smooth before the yolks go in, and the pan must be off the boil at that point or the yolks scramble. A loose panada leaks out of the birds and the stuffing turns to paste.
- Chicken liversTrim the green-tinged bile spots and any connective tissue. Saut he centcentre still pink; livers cooked hard go grainy and will not sieve cleanly. "Aromatics" here probably means a pinch of mixed spice in the French sense -- nutmeg, clove, mace, thyme.
- SievingA drum sieve and wooden mushroom would have been the likely tool. A food processor followed by a push through a fine sieve gives the same smooth pur he with less labour.
- BaconUse thin streaky bacon or pancetta, cut without a rind so it moulds to the bird; unsmoked keeps the flavour closer to the quail. Its main job is to bard the breast, and it can be removed before serving if you want colour on the skin.
- Cooking and finishingCheck the birds rather than trusting the clock: farmed quail vary from about 130 g to 200 g, and the recipe finishes them in the sauce after the half hour in butter. Pour off the butter before adding the demi-glace or Madeira, as the recipe directs, or the excess fat will slick the sauce.
- YieldOne quail per person as an entrée in a long menu, two as a main course. Serve with the sauce spooned over and something plain beneath croûtes, a potato purée or braised lentils.
Quail was standard high-table game in Britain and France well into the twentieth century, and cookery books of this class list it among the entr hees -- the dish served between fish and roast, small, richly sauced and eaten with a fork. The method here is thoroughly French: a panade of breadcrumbs cooked in milk and bound with yolks, enriched with a sieved liver pur hee, is a classic base for stuffing small birds, and a related liver-based forcemeat appears under the name farce ha gratin, though that is usually made without a milk panada. Barding in bacon compensates for the near-total absence of fat on a quail, and finishing in demi-glace or Madeira assumes a brown sauce already made up in the kitchen. Almost all quail sold today is farmed, which makes the birds fatter and milder than wild ones; wild quail are protected or seasonally restricted in much of Europe and North America.