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Three Truffles (Cut up the bacon and put it)
Cut up the bacon and put it in a sauté-pan; let it cook for a few minutes, then add the livers, shalot, white peppers, cloves, and bouquet. Let this all cook carefully; pound all in the mortar, pass through a hair-sieve, then add the chopped truffles. Stuff each quail into shape, butter some paper cases, called "Quail cases," or oil them, put the quail into the case, a few drops of salad oil on each, when they should be put in the oven for about ten minutes.
The page is the tail end of a longer entry: the ingredient list, headed by the three truffles of the title, has been separated from the method. What survives is a liver-and-truffle forcemeat, quail stuffed with it, and a brief roast in paper cases.
- What the missing list heldThe forcemeat calls for bacon, livers (chicken livers are easier to get in quantity), a shallot, white pepper, cloves, a bouquet garni and chopped truffles; the title implies three. Quantities are not on this page, so any figures are a modern guess: for four quail, roughly 2 oz bacon, 4 oz livers, one shallot and a small truffle or two will fill them.
- The hinge: cook the livers barelyEverything after this point is brief, so the forcemeat is effectively finished when it leaves the pan. The recipe says only to cook it carefully; livers taken to grey pound into a dry, granular paste that no amount of butter will rescue.
- Mortar and hair-sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but still push the purée through a fine sieve afterwards. The sieve is what removes membrane and sinew and gives the smooth texture the recipe is after.
- Add truffle off the heatThe chopped truffles go in after sieving, never into the pan. Their aroma is volatile and largely lost to sustained heat; folding them into the warm purée is what perfumes it.
- "Shalot" and clovesShalot is shallot. The recipe pounds everything together and then sieves it, so whole cloves and the bouquet are caught by the hair-sieve rather than fished out beforehand; no quantity is given.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the page uses no oven term at all. The birds here are stuffed whole. Ten minutes is short for a modern farmed quail; allow around 15 minutes in a hot oven and check that the thigh juices run clear.
- Paper casesThe "quail case" was a moulded paper shell, buttered or oiled as the recipe directs, though it does not say why. Small ovenproof ramekins or foil-lined paper baking cups do the same job.
- YieldOne quail per person as an entrée in the old sense — a small course between fish and roast. Two per person if it is the main dish.
Quail in paper cases belongs to the kind of entrée often associated with the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a course of small, highly finished dishes served between the fish and the roast at a long dinner, though the page itself carries no date. The forcemeat here — bacon, liver, shallot, clove, truffle, pounded and sieved — is a domestic descendant of the gratin stuffings of French professional kitchens, and the truffle sits in a dish that otherwise uses cheap offal. Quail were then both wild-shot and, increasingly, imported live and fattened, which is why a cook could be expected to have several at once. The paper case is worth noticing as a piece of period service: it let a kitchen send up something small and fragile without it collapsing on the journey, and it made portioning at table effortless for the servants doing the handing.