Home › Poultry and Game Recipes › Quails En Casserole
Quails En Casserole
2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter ¼ lb. preserved cherries 1 wineglassful port wine 1/2 pint (I cup) stock 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) red currant 1/2 orange rind jelly ½ lemon Salt and pepper to season Prepare and truss the quails. Melt the butter in an earthenware pan; when hot, put in the birds, and brown them all over.
Cover with the lid, and put into a moderate oven till ready.
Lift out the quails and keep hot. Drain the fat from the pan, add the stock, wine, and orange rind.
Simmer for ten minutes, then stir in the jelly. Put in the quails for ten minutes; season with salt, pepper, and the strained lemon juice.
An Edwardian game recipe in which the birds are browned, roasted and then finished in a port-and-currant-jelly sauce. The ingredient list has come through with the columns interleaved, so read it carefully before shopping.
- The scrambled ingredient listTwo columns have run together: the entries resolve as butter, 1/4 lb preserved cherries, a wineglass of port, 1/2 pint (1 cup) stock, 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) red currant jelly, the rind of half an orange, half a lemon, salt and pepper. The "14 lb" of cherries is 1/4 lb; the "red currant" and "jelly" belong to the same line.
- How many quailsNo number is given; the recipe assumes the cook already knows how many she is buying. The sauce quantities would suit four to six birds, and quail are small enough that two per person is a fair serving.
- "Casserole" means the potHere the casserole is the vessel, not a baked assembly. The earthenware pan called for is a lidded dish that goes from the burner to the oven; a heavy enamelled cast-iron pot does the same job. Unglazed earthenware over direct heat cracks unless it is designed for it.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Quail are done in roughly 20 to 25 minutes at that heat, and "till ready" is the only guidance given, so check rather than trust the clock.
- The hinge: do not overcook the birdsQuail have almost no fat and go dry and stringy fast. Take them out while the thigh juices still run faintly pink, since they get a further ten minutes in the hot sauce at the end, which finishes them.
- A wineglassfulAround 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, in period usage — not a modern 6 oz pour. Use a tawny or ruby port; the sauce is already sweet from the jelly and the cherries.
- The cherries"Preserved cherries" means cherries put up in syrup, closer to today's jarred morello or Amarena cherries than to glacé fruit. Drain them and add at the end with the lemon juice so they hold their shape; the recipe as printed never tells you when to put them in.
- Balancing the sauceHalf a cup of currant jelly against one cup of stock is a great deal of sugar. Strain out the orange rind, then add the lemon juice a little at a time until the sauce tastes savoury rather than confected. Reduce further if it is thin.
Quail dressed with port, currant jelly and preserved cherries belongs to the late-Victorian and Edwardian game repertoire, where small birds were routinely paired with a sweet-sharp fruit sauce — the same logic that put redcurrant jelly beside venison and Cumberland sauce beside cold game. Currant jelly was a standing item in the store cupboard precisely because it did this work: it thickened, glazed and sweetened a stock-and-wine reduction in one move, without the labour of a proper espagnole. The book's premise, cooking in earthenware casseroles, reflects a genuine early twentieth-century enthusiasm for the lidded pot as a fuel-saving, moisture-keeping alternative to the open roast. Quail at this date were largely imported and fattened rather than shot wild, the wild bird being scarce; the birds sold today are almost entirely farmed, which is why they are plumper and more forgiving than the recipe's vague "till ready" implies.