Home › Poultry and Game › Broiled Quail
Broiled Quail
Follow recipe for Broiled Chicken allowing eight minutes for cooking. Serve on toast with rice croquettes and currant jelly.
A cross-reference recipe: the whole method lives in the book's entry for Broiled Chicken, and only the timing and garnish change. Quail are small enough that the difference between good and dry is a minute or two, so heat management is the whole job.
- What the base recipe assumesBroiled Chicken in books of this period means the bird split down the back, opened flat, breastbone cracked so it lies level, wiped dry, seasoned and rubbed or brushed with butter. Do the same with quail: spatchcock, flatten firmly, and dry the skin well or it will steam rather than colour.
- Eight minutes means fierce heatThe original is written for a gridiron over live coals or a coal-range broiler, cooking hard from one side at a time. Under a modern broiler element set high, with the birds four to five inches from the heat, eight to ten minutes total, turned once, is realistic for farmed quail of 4-6 oz. A cast-iron grill pan or an outdoor grill is closer to the intended result than an oven broiler.
- DonenessUSDA guidance for all poultry is 165F in the thickest part of the thigh. Restaurant practice with quail often stops short of that at the breast; if you follow the book's eight minutes, check with an instant-read thermometer rather than by eye, since the birds are too small to judge by juices.
- Farmed versus wildFarmed quail, sold semi-boneless or whole, are consistent in size and mild. Wild birds are leaner, cook faster still, and may carry shot; run a finger over the breast before cooking. Commercial quail farming was negligible in this period, so the birds behind the entry were most likely wild and in season, which the book does not trouble to state.
- YieldTwo quail per person as a main course, one as a first course. The original gives no number.
- Rice croquettesRice croquettes of this period are generally cooked rice bound with egg and a little thick white sauce, chilled firm, shaped, crumbed and fried. They can be formed and breaded a day ahead and fried while the birds broil, which makes the timing much easier.
- The toast and the jellyThe toast is structural, not decorative: it catches the juices from a bird that has been cooked flat. Cut it to the size of the quail and do not butter it heavily. Red currant jelly is the standard English accompaniment to small game; cranberry or a tart quince paste stands in acceptably.
Quail appear throughout American and English game cookery of the late nineteenth century as an autumn and winter luxury, sold by the brace at market and hunted widely enough that a general household manual could assume readers had access to them. The pairing here is entirely conventional for the period: small game bird, a slice of toast to sit on, a starchy fried garnish, and red currant jelly. The extreme brevity of the entry is itself typical of the book's method, which builds families of dishes off a single master recipe and adjusts only the cooking time; it saved type and assumed a cook who would read the chapter rather than a single page. Market hunting of quail on this scale eventually came to an end, and quail on a restaurant menu today is almost always farmed.