Sauce
Ingredients.
One gill of Brown Sauce.
One tablespoonful of Glaze.
Two tablespoonfuls of chopped Truffles.
Half gill of Sherry.
Put the bones of the quails in a stewpan, add the glaze and brown sauce; let this boil to extract the flavour from the bones, strain, and add the truffles and the sherry; put about one tablespoonful of this sauce over each quail when they are taken from the oven, after very carefully draining off all grease from the quails. Serve them in the cases.
Cailles Poelées à l'Anglaise.
This is the sauce half of a quail dish — the entrée itself is assumed to be cooked elsewhere in the book, and the page gives only the finishing sauce built on the birds' bones. Everything hangs on reducing a small quantity properly rather than boiling it away.
- A gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, or a generous half cup; the half gill of sherry is 2 1/2 fl oz. The recipe does not say how many birds it dresses, only that each quail gets about a tablespoonful.
- Brown sauce"Brown Sauce" in books of this period may mean sauce espagnole (brown roux, brown stock and mirepoix, long simmered and skimmed), or a simpler brown roux and stock gravy; the recipe does not say which. A good demi-glace or a well-reduced dark veal stock lightly thickened is the practical substitute. Commercial gravy browning is not the same thing and will taste of it.
- GlazeGlace de viande — brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets firm when cold. A tablespoon is there for body and gloss, not for volume. Reduced stock concentrate or a spoonful of your own reduced veal stock does the job; bouillon cubes bring salt without gelatine.
- The bonesChop or crack the carcasses before they go into the stewpan, brown them if they are not already browned, and give the sauce ten to fifteen minutes of gentle simmering rather than a hard boil. The point is extraction, and a hard boil will cloud and over-reduce a quantity this small very quickly.
- The sherry goes in lastIt does go in after straining, though the recipe says nothing about the heat; keeping it to a bare simmer preserves the aroma. A dry or medium-dry sherry (fino or amontillado) suits; cream sherry makes the sauce cloying.
- TrufflesTwo tablespoons of chopped truffle was an ordinary luxury in a Victorian professional kitchen and is a serious expense now. Preserved black truffle, or truffle peelings with a little of their juice, is the honest stand-in; add them at the end so they warm through rather than cook.
- Draining the greaseQuail roasted in a poêlé style throw a good deal of fat. Tip each bird cavity-down and let it drain before saucing, or the tablespoon of sauce will slide off into a greasy pool in the case.
- The cases"Serve them in the cases" presumably refers to cases described elsewhere in the book; small paper cases (caisses) or pastry croustades were the usual thing, though the recipe does not say the birds were cooked in them. A fried crouton under each bird catches the sauce in the same way.
- The titleCailles poêlées à l'anglaise: poêlé is cooking in a covered pan with butter and aromatics rather than open roasting, which accounts for the fat that has to be drained off the birds.
Quail served in individual paper cases with a truffled brown sauce is generally placed in the late nineteenth-century professional repertoire, where French technique was applied to British game. The structure of the sauce is the standard hierarchy of the classical kitchen: a mother sauce (espagnole) already in the larder, sharpened with glaze from the stockpot, then given a specific identity by the bones of the very birds being served and a fortified wine added off the heat. That economy is the mark of a professional book rather than a domestic one, assuming both espagnole and glace de viande standing ready. Truffles were imported from France in quantity through this period and appear freely in such books.