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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.
A hotel-scale cold buffet piece: two dozen boned quail, each stuffed with a fine forcemeat and a diced garnish, poached in individual moulds and pressed. The work is all in the boning and the seasoning; the cooking is gentle and forgiving.
- The hinge: saltWhitehead flags this himself and he is right. Corned tongue, ham, bacon and glace de viande each bring their own salt, so the spiced salt and any added seasoning should be cut back hard. Fry a teaspoon of the finished forcemeat and the diced mixture together and taste before anything is stuffed.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F, and since these must not brown or fry, err on the low side, about 325F. The moulds sit in a pan of boiling water, so the birds themselves cook gently below boiling point and an hour is about right for quail this size.
- GodiveauSimply a fine pounded forcemeat, here pork tenderloin, cooked chicken and fresh fat pork. A food processor does in two minutes what a mortar did in twenty; keep everything cold, add the fat last as directed, and still pass it through a drum sieve or fine strainer for the smooth texture the recipe expects.
- Fresh fat porkUnsalted back fat or fatback, not salt pork. At 20 ounces against 24 ounces of lean it is a rich mix by modern eyes, but the fat is what keeps a pressed galantine sliceable rather than dry and crumbly.
- Spiced saltThe period's sel épicé: salt with black and white pepper, nutmeg, clove, mace, bay and thyme, in proportions that varied from kitchen to kitchen. Quatre épices mixed into salt is the nearest thing sold ready-made.
- Gem pans and granitewareDeep muffin tins, in enamelled steel. Any deep individual mould works, but it must be tall enough to hold liquid above the bird. The "nests of ten or twelve fastened together" are the old gang moulds; separate ramekins in a roasting tin are equivalent.
- Flour-and-water pasteA luting paste, stiff flour-and-water dough used only to seal the mould so nothing dries or colours. It is discarded, never eaten. Foil and a tight lid do the same job.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until syrupy and setting firm when cold. Commercial demi-glace concentrate substitutes, but check its salt against the point above.
- Truffles"2, 3, or 4 cans of truffles" reflects a hotel kitchen that kept tinned truffle on the shelf as a working ingredient. Preserved truffle peelings or a small quantity of good tinned truffle will do; cultivated mushrooms, as the recipe allows, are the honest fallback.
- Sourcing the quailFarmed quail are sold semi-boneless, which removes most of the labour; buying them fully in the feather and boning through the back is otherwise a long afternoon. Leave the leg bones in and stuff the half-boned legs, as the last line suggests, if the birds are going out unlabelled.
- Cooling and pressingThe original presses the moulds under weights at room temperature. Do the pressing in the refrigerator instead, and keep the finished galantines chilled until service; this is cooked meat held for hours or days, and the period's cool larder is not a modern kitchen.
- YieldTwenty-four birds, so a platter for a large buffet. The forcemeat and dice quantities scale down cleanly, and six or eight quail is a more realistic domestic batch.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for American hotel and restaurant cooks in the 1880s and 90s, and this page shows the trade at full stretch: a garde-manger dish meant to be sliced cold, glazed with aspic and built into a pyramid or ranged around a larger boned turkey on the cold buffet. A galantine — the name is generally traced to Old French words for jelly, the dish being served in its own set stock — is a bird boned, stuffed, reshaped, poached and pressed, and doing it at quail scale is showing off on purpose. The chatty digression about the Count of Monte Cristo's supper cave and its Corsican blackbirds is characteristic of Whitehead, who habitually broke off to needle boarding-house cooking and flatter the hotel transient; it also records the older European habit of serving small songbirds whole, heads replaced for effect. Quail itself was ordinary restaurant fare in this period, much of it wild-shot and sold by market gunners; that trade in wild game for sale was progressively shut down by state laws and the federal Lacey Act at the turn of the century, and the quail a cook buys today is farmed.