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Roast Quail
Dress, clean, and truss the bird. Stuff each with one large oyster. Lard breast and legs. Bake the same as Larded Grouse, allowing fifteen to twenty minutes for cooking.
Four lines of instruction that assume you have already read the recipe for Larded Grouse and know how to handle a small bird. The pieces the original leaves out are the oven, the fat, and how to tell when a quail is done.
- The hinge: do not overcookA quail weighs 4-6 oz dressed and its breast dries out in a matter of minutes. Fifteen to twenty minutes in a hot oven is right; pull the birds when the thickest part of the breast reads about 155-160F and let them rest five minutes.
- "Bake the same as Larded Grouse"The cross-reference points to a recipe not reproduced here, so what it actually specifies cannot be recovered from this page. A hot oven, around 425-450F, on a rack over a shallow pan so the drippings do not scorch, with two or three bastings of pan fat or melted butter, suits the fifteen-to-twenty-minute timing.
- LardingLarding means threading thin strips of chilled salt pork or fatback through the flesh with a larding needle, which few kitchens own. Draping the breast and legs with thin bacon or fatback (barding) does the same job; remove it for the last few minutes if you want colour on the skin.
- "Dress, clean, and truss"Dress here most likely covers plucking and singeing and clean means drawing the bird, though period usage of "dress" is not always so precise. Farmed quail come oven-ready and often semi-boneless; buy them bone-in with skin for this treatment. Tie the legs together and pin the wings so the small joints do not char.
- The oysterOne large shucked oyster goes into the body cavity, seasoning the bird from within as it steams. Drain it well or the cavity will boil rather than roast. At this cooking time the oyster comes out barely set; if that troubles you, leave it out and use a knob of herb butter.
- SeasoningThe original assumes salt and pepper as a matter of course and does not mention them. Season inside and out before larding.
- Yield and servingTwo birds per person as a main course, one as a first course. Period practice was to serve them on toast or fried bread set under the birds to catch the juices, with a tart jelly alongside.
- SourcingFarmed coturnix or bobwhite quail, fresh or frozen, is sold by game butchers and many Asian and Latin markets. Wild quail is legal only as the taking of a game bird in season by a licensed hunter and cannot be bought.
Quail was standard market game in nineteenth-century America, sold by the dozen in city stalls alongside grouse, snipe and woodcock, and the small birds were treated almost as a garnish course: larded, roasted hard and fast, and served on toast. Stuffing game and poultry with a single oyster belongs to the same American habit that put oysters into turkey dressing, chicken pies and sauces for boiled fowl, at a time when oysters were cheap, plentiful and shipped inland in barrels. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book for the same middle-class household its patterns served, and its chapter on game assumes both a larding needle and access to a poulterer. The recipe's brevity, and its reliance on the Larded Grouse instructions a few pages away, is typical of the period's method of writing a game chapter as a set of variations on one technique.