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To Roast Partridges
Clean the birds as for stuffing. Rub with butter, salt and pepper. Put in sheets of letter paper and allow to cook in this way.--Mrs. W. C.
Barely more than a note — the sort of shorthand one cook passes to another. Everything about heat and time is left out, so the useful work here is filling in the numbers.
- The hinge: the paperThe paper case is what makes this work, trapping steam and butter around a bird that would otherwise dry out in minutes. Use parchment, not "letter paper" — modern writing and printer stock carries sizing, optical brighteners and inks that have no business in a hot oven.
- What a Virginia partridge isIn Virginia usage of this period "partridge" ordinarily means the bobwhite quail, a small bird of roughly 4 oz dressed, not the larger European grey partridge. Farmed quail is the closest match; a poussin or Cornish hen will also take this treatment but needs longer.
- Oven heatRoast small birds hot and fast: 425F. Quail in a paper case are done in 15 to 20 minutes, a 1 lb chukar-sized bird in 25 to 30.
- "Clean as for stuffing"Means fully dressed — plucked, drawn, the cavity wiped out, and the crop and any shot tracks removed. Wild-shot birds should be checked for pellets and bloodshot flesh before they go in.
- Butter and saltRub softened butter under the breast skin as well as over it. Game birds carry almost no fat, and the interior butter is what keeps the breast from turning to sawdust; a strip of bacon inside the paper does the same job.
- DonenessCook to 165F at the thickest part of the breast if you want it safe by current standards. Traditional game cookery pulls quail a shade earlier, faintly pink at the bone, which is a matter of preference rather than method.
- ServingOne quail per person as a course, two as a main. Open the paper at the table — the accumulated butter and juices are the sauce, and there is no other.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, credits its recipes the way this one is credited: by initials, on the presumption — often assumed, though not stated in the book — that readers in the same circle would know who Mrs. W. C. was. Game birds appear all through the book, and in the Virginia Piedmont bobwhite quail were shot in quantity through the autumn and cooked simply, often with nothing but butter, salt and pepper. Roasting in a paper wrapper is an old and thrifty version of what French cookery calls en papillote; before parchment was a domestic staple, cooks used whatever clean sheet was to hand, which is probably what "sheets of letter paper" means here. The brevity of the instruction is itself informative: it assumes a cook who already knows how hot her fire is and how long a small bird takes, and needs only to be told the trick.