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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-referenced recipe: it assumes you have already read the book's instructions for broiled chicken and simply shortens the time for a much smaller bird. A few things need translating.
- What "broiling" meantCooking the split, flattened bird over or under direct heat, turning once. The chicken recipe this one refers back to is not reproduced here, so the details of butter and timing come from period practice generally. A modern broiler element at full heat, with the rack a few inches below, is the nearest equivalent to the gridiron or gas broiler the book assumes.
- Eight minutes is optimisticThat timing suits a very hot fire and a small wild bird. Farmed quail run 4-6 oz dressed and generally need 10-14 minutes total under a home broiler, turned halfway. Judge by the thigh joint rather than the clock.
- DonenessPoultry, quail included, is safest at 165F in the thickest part of the thigh. The breast will be dry by then, which is why the birds are basted with butter and served on toast that catches the juices.
- SourcingFarmed quail, often sold semi-boneless, can be found frozen in some butchers and Asian markets. They are generally meatier and fattier than the wild birds an American recipe of this date would have assumed, most likely bobwhite, so they take heat a little better.
- YieldThe book gives none. Reckon two birds per person as a main course, one as the game course in a longer meal, which is how it is placed here.
- The toast is structuralThe toast -- The recipe says only to serve the birds on pieces of toast. Practically, its role is to soak up the butter and juices; a firm white bread, cut thick, holds up best.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is still made and still the classic accompaniment to small game. If you cannot find it, a tart unsweetened-tasting jelly serves the same purpose; grape jelly is too sweet.
Quail was a staple of the American game course at the turn of the twentieth century, when wild birds were shot in quantity and sold openly in city markets alongside snipe, plover and woodcock. Market hunting was curtailed in the United States in the early decades of the century by a run of state and federal restrictions, and game birds gradually became either something a hunter brought home or, later, something raised on a farm. The pairing with currant jelly is older than the book and generally traced to English practice, where a sharp red preserve was the standing answer to any roasted or broiled game.