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Broiled Quail
Follow recipe for Broiling Chicken, allowing eight minutes for cooking. Serve on pieces of toast, and garnish with parsley and thin slices of lemon. Currant jelly or Rice Croquettes with Jelly should accompany this course.
A cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the method is the book's Broiled Chicken, scaled down to a bird that weighs a few ounces. Almost everything that matters here is timing and heat.
- Buy farmed quailWild quail is not legally sold in the United States; state game laws, backed by the federal Lacey Act, closed the market-gunning trade in the first decades of the twentieth century. Farmed coturnix or bobwhite quail, roughly 4-6 oz each dressed, are widely available frozen and are what this recipe now means.
- Split and flatten firstPeriod broiling recipes of this kind have the bird split down the back, opened flat and wiped dry before it goes on the fire; check the book's Broiling Chicken entry. A whole unsplit quail will not cook through in eight minutes.
- What "broil" meantIn this period a double-sided wire broiler held over or under live coals, turned frequently. A modern overhead broiler on high, with the rack set about 4 inches from the element, is the nearest equivalent; a very hot ridged grill pan also works.
- Eight minutes is total, not per sideRoughly four minutes skin side away from the heat, then four skin side toward it, watching closely at the end. Quail is lean and goes from juicy to dry in under a minute.
- DonenessRestaurants often serve quail breast slightly pink. The USDA figure for poultry is 165F at the thigh, which will put the breast past pink. Decide before you start, because on a bird this small the margin between the two is very short.
- Season and greaseBroiled-bird recipes of this type generally season with salt and pepper and spread butter over the bird after cooking; check the parent recipe. Oil or butter the grate as well; there is little fat in a quail to keep it from sticking.
- The toast is functionalIt catches the juices, which are the best part of a small bird. Use a firm white bread, cut to the size of the split quail, and toast it just before serving so it does not go leathery.
- YieldAs a modern serving, two birds per person for a main course, one where it stands as a single course in a longer menu; the recipe's reference to "this course" is all the book says on the point.
Quail in an American cookbook of this date almost always means the bobwhite, a bird then sold openly in city markets alongside grouse, woodcock and canvasback duck. That trade was enormous and unregulated, and it is the reason a Boston cooking school aimed at middle-class housekeepers could treat game birds as an ordinary purchase; within a couple of decades legislation, principally at the state level, had largely ended the commercial sale of wild game, and quail became a farmed product or a hunter's own. The accompaniments are the period's fixed grammar for game: something tart and sweet, usually currant jelly, set against dark lean flesh, with a starch to absorb the juices. Serving small birds on toast is older still, generally traced to the European practice of catching the drippings of roasted songbirds on a slice of bread set beneath the spit.