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Roast Quail
Dress, clean, lard, and truss a quail. Bake same as Larded Grouse, allowing fifteen to twenty minutes for cooking.
Two sentences that assume you have already read the Larded Grouse entry a few pages earlier, and that you own a larding needle. Here is what the shorthand covers.
- The cross-referenceThe method lives in the Larded Grouse entry a few pages earlier; this page supplies only the timing. That entry calls for a hot oven and frequent basting, but the book gives no oven temperature in degrees, so any figure (a modern kitchen would read "hot" as roughly 425-450F) is an interpretation, not something the text states.
- "Dress" means pluck and drawIn 1896 a quail arrived whole and feathered. A modern farmed quail comes plucked and drawn, often semi-boneless; skip straight to trussing.
- Larding vs. bardingLarding is threading strips of chilled salt pork through the breast with a larding needle. Without the needle, bard instead: lay thin bacon or sheets of pork fat over the breast and tie it on. Quail has almost no fat of its own and will dry out in minutes without one or the other.
- The hinge is the clockFifteen to twenty minutes is right for a whole bird at high heat, but the margin is small. Pull the birds when the thickest part of the breast reads 155-160F; carryover finishes them. Five extra minutes turns quail to sawdust.
- TrussingTie the legs together and press the wings tight to the body, or the extremities scorch before the breast is done. A single loop of butcher's twine per bird is enough.
- YieldThe recipe is written for one bird. Allow two quail per person as a main course, one as a first course.
- If the bird was shotWild quail may carry shot in the breast meat. Feel for it before larding, and warn anyone at the table.
Quail was standard American market game in Fannie Farmer's day: bobwhite and other small birds were sold by the brace in city markets through the autumn, alongside grouse, plover and reedbirds, all of which have their own terse entries in this section. The brevity may well be the point — Farmer seems to have expected a cook to master one method for small larded birds and then vary only the timing, which would explain why the quail gets two sentences and the grouse gets the full instructions. Market hunting on that scale ended in the United States through state game laws and the interstate-trade provisions of the Lacey Act, so nearly all quail sold today is farmed, most of it Japanese coturnix, a milder bird than the wild bobwhite this recipe had in mind. Larding — sewing fat into lean meat — was routine kitchen work then and is now largely replaced by barding or brining.