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Galantines Of Quails
First prepare the godiveau or forcemeat to fill out the thin parts of the quails: 12 ounces of pork tenderloins. 12 ounces of cooked chicken meat. 20 ounces of fresh fat pork.
Pound them smooth, the chicken first, the tenderloin added and then the fat. Season with spiced salt and rub the paste through a seive. Then prepare these for filling, all cut in small dice: 1 cooked red corned tongue. 1 pound of chicken livers-parboiled. 12 ounces of cooked fat bacon. 12 ounces of cooked ham. 2,3, or 4 cans of truffles-or, some mushrooms. Salt, spices, madeira wine or sherry. Bacon slices to wrap the birds in. Some meat glaze. Flour-and-water paste.
When you have cut the tongue, livers, bacon fat, ham and truffles in small dice season them either with spiced salt or with pepper and spices equivalent, and then stir in half a cup of wine.
Bone two dozen quails, wipe them dry and clean; pare some meat from the breasts and lay it over the thin places; spread over them a little of the forcemeat paste, over that a layer of the dice-cut mixture, and then fold up the quails to their original shape. Instead of sewing roll each bird in a thin slice of unsmoked bacon or dry salt pork. These are now to be cooked separately and this is best done in deep muffin pans or gem pans of graniteware-either round or oval will do but they must be large enough to hold gravy above the quails, and in nests of ten or twelve fastened together the usual way. Press the galantines into the pans, pour over a little melted fresh butter mixed with meat glaze (natural meat gravy simmered down thick), cover each one with a crust of flour-and-water paste, bake in a moderate oven about an hour, the gem pans or moulds set in a baking pan containing boiling water.-They must not brown nor fry.
When done take off the paste covers and let the quails cool a little, then press them by setting one nest of pans or moulds on top of the other and weights on top of all. When quite cold take the galantines from the moulds, remove the covering of bacon, trim them and use in the ways of the larger galantines, either to slice in jelly, built in a pyramid and decorated, or to surround a larger galantine.
The greatest care is required in seasoning the above lest they come out too salt, the ham, tongue and bacon all being likely to contribute some. The butter used should be poured off clear, and fresh pork may be used for outside wrapping instead of salt, rather than risk anything. Somewhere, I think, the Count of Monte Christo has a splendid cold supper set in a wonderful cave, and there is a large fowl, perhaps it was a turkey, surrounded by Corsican blackbirds. Likely enough the heads of the blackbirds were set on again after the tiny galantines were cooked and ornamented. But it is not likely that the cook made a separate lot of fillings for the birds when he had just stuffed the turkey with another kind. He might have had to do so had he been cooking for a houseful of boarders without appetites, to whom nothing tastes good, but he had to serve only transients, just arriving and mostly delighted with all they meet with at the hotel table. The cook in that case used for the large galantine the same kind of forcemeat as that in our boned turkeys and chickens some distance back, which is very good and not too artificially flavored, and he took some of the same and added truffles cut small to it for the galantines of birds. When boning quails for a supper where there is no bill of fare to turn attention to them it is best to leave the legs on-boned half way and stuffed-to show what they are.