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Roast Quails (Clean and remove the head)
Clean and remove the head and neck; truss as a fowl; rub them over with a little butter and tie a vine leaf over the breast of each bird, and put a piece of fat bacon over the leaf; fasten this with a long skewer and arrange several birds on the same skewer. They will take from fifteen to twenty minutes to roast. When cooked remove the bacon and vine leaf, and dish each bird up on a square slice of buttered toast; put watercress round, and hand fried breadcrumbs and good brown gravy. Quails are in season from March to July.
Ortolans. These are cooked and served in the same manner as quails.
A classic French-influenced treatment of small birds, written for a cook with a spit and a supply of vine leaves. It converts easily, with two provisos: the timing assumes very fierce heat, and the ortolan footnote is now a dead letter.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Fifteen to twenty minutes implies a fierce heat; in a modern oven roughly 425-450F suits. Modern farmed quail run around 4-6 oz dressed and need about 15 minutes at that temperature, breast up, then a few minutes' rest; overcooked quail is dry almost immediately.
- Do not attempt the ortolanOrtolan buntings are a protected species across Europe and their capture, sale and consumption are illegal. The final line of the recipe cannot be followed today under any circumstances.
- Vine leavesFresh unsprayed leaves are best if you have a vine; brined leaves from a jar work but must be rinsed and patted dry or the birds turn salty. The leaf is usually said to add a faint resinous flavour and to protect the breast skin under the bacon, rather than serving as decoration.
- The baconUse thin, unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta. Modern smoked, heavily cured supermarket bacon will overwhelm a bird this delicate, and thick rashers will not render in fifteen minutes.
- SkeweringThreading several birds on one long skewer suggests spit-roasting. In an oven, set the skewered birds across a small roasting tin so they sit clear of their own fat, or simply space them in the tin — but keep the barding tied on until the last few minutes.
- Trussing "as a fowl"For a bird this size that means no more than tying the legs together and pinning the wings back with string so nothing splays and dries out.
- Fried breadcrumbsCoarse dry white crumbs fried slowly in butter until sandy and golden, served separately in a hot dish. They are a customary accompaniment to roast game birds and provide the crunch the skin cannot.
- Yield and seasonAllow two birds a head as a main course, one as a savoury or first course. The March-to-July season given does not correspond to any British game season and probably reflects the supply of imported birds; farmed quail are available year round and need no seasonal thought.
Quail reached the late-Victorian kitchen as a luxury import, mostly netted birds shipped alive from Egypt, Italy and the Levant and fattened in cages by poulterers until wanted — which is why a British cookery book gives a spring and early-summer "season" that matches no British game law. The barding method here, a vine leaf next to the skin with fat bacon over it, is lifted straight from French practice for petits oiseaux, where the same treatment was used for woodcock, larks, thrushes and ortolans; the leaf is generally traced to Roman cookery, though the continuity is more assumed than documented. The casual final sentence about ortolans marks the period exactly: the fig-fattened bunting was then simply another item on a high-class menu, and is now a protected bird whose consumption is banned. Serving each bird on its own square of buttered toast, with watercress and fried crumbs handed round, was one familiar way of presenting small game, the toast doing the work of catching the juices.