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Breast of Quail Lucullus
Remove breasts with bone from six quail, lard, and bake in a hot oven twenty minutes, basting every five minutes with rich brown stock, that breasts may have a glazed appearance. Mould corn meal or hominy mush in cone shape; when firm remove from mould and sprinkle with finely chopped parsley. Arrange breasts on cone around base, and make six nests of mashed seasoned sweet potato around base of cone at equal distances, using a pastry bag and rose tube. Fill nests with creamed mushrooms and sweetbread. Garnish between nests with toasted bread points, the tips of which have been brushed with white of egg, then dipped in finely chopped parsley. Insert a stab frill in each nest and one in top of cone.
Serve with one and one-half cups rich brown sauce seasoned with tomato catsup and mashed sweet potato. A small amount of the sweet potato gives a suggestion of chestnuts.
Pan Broiled Lamb Chops à la Lucullus Pan broil lamb chops and garnish same as Breast of Quail Lucullus.
An elaborate plated entrée from the era when a dinner course was expected to be built vertically. The cooking is quick and simple; the assembly is where the work sits.
- The hinge: twenty minutes is too longThe hinge: twenty minutes is likely too long -- Quail breast is lean and very small, and in a hot oven it will be dry well before the clock runs out. Eight to twelve minutes, basting twice, brings the meat to a faintly pink centre; the glaze comes from the reduced stock, not from extra time in the oven.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperature; in period usage the term is generally taken as somewhere around 400–450°F. The high heat is what sets the basted stock into a lacquer rather than letting it steam off the meat.
- LardingThreading strips of chilled pork fat through the meat with a larding needle. Few cooks own one now. Barding — laying a thin sheet of fatback or a rasher of streaky bacon over each breast and tying or securing it — does the same job on a piece this small.
- Sourcing quailFarmed quail is sold whole, frozen, and often semi-boneless. Six birds yield twelve small breast halves, which is one plated course for six people, not a main.
- "Rich brown stock" and "rich brown sauce"Espagnole or a demi-glace: veal or beef stock reduced until it coats a spoon. A thin stock will not glaze. The finishing sauce is a cup and a half of that, sharpened with ketchup and finished with a small amount of the mashed sweet potato.
- Hominy mushCoarse grits or polenta cooked stiff, poured into a wetted cone mould or a funnel lined with plastic, and chilled until it will unmould and stand. Cornmeal mush behaves the same way.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, pressed under a weight, and the membrane peeled away before they go into a cream sauce. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows this.
- Stab frillsThe frilled paper cuffs once sold for cutlet bones. Decorative only, and freely omitted.
- Rose tubeA star piping tip. The sweet potato needs to be dry and stiff — bake the potatoes rather than boiling them, or the nests will slump.
The name is a borrowing from classical Rome: Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the general whose table became a byword for extravagance, and whose name French cookery attached to garnishes built above all on truffle. By the time the book reached the entrée chapter, "à la Lucullus" had become a formula in American hotel and cooking-school cookery — meaning, in practice, small game plus sweetbreads plus mushrooms plus a brown sauce, arranged tall. The construction here, with its cone, its piped nests and its paper frills, belongs to the chafing-dish-and-service era of American cooking, when a school-trained cook was judged as much on presentation as on flavour. Quail was still a familiar market bird when the book was written; the commercial trade in wild game birds was curtailed in the United States in the early twentieth century, and quail on a modern plate is almost always farmed.