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Larded Quails
Singe, draw and wash the quails, lard the breasts and legs, run a small skewer through the legs and tail and bind them firmly round with thread. Baste the breasts with a small quantity of clarified butter, dust a little salt over and dredge them thickly with flour. Place the quails in a bakingdish and bake them in a quick oven for fifteen minutes. Put a layer of bread sauce on a hot dish; when cooked untie the birds, place them on the dish with the bread sauce, sift plenty of fried breadcrumbs over them, garnish with a little parsley, and serve.
A plain roast game bird from the Waldorf's kitchen, built around three things that have largely dropped out of home cooking: larding, bread sauce and fried crumbs. The method still works, but the quantities and the oven need translating.
- The hinge: fifteen minutes and no moreA quail weighs four to six ounces and the breast is thin. Fifteen minutes in a hot oven is close to the limit; pull the birds when the breast reads about 155-160F and let them sit five minutes. Roasted to well done they turn dry and livery, which is why the larding is there in the first place.
- A quick ovenPeriod equivalence tables put this somewhere around 400-450F. Preheat fully; part of the point is to set the flour crust and render the larding fat before the bird overcooks.
- LardingLarding means threading strips of chilled pork fatback through the flesh with a larding needle. Few home kitchens have one. Barding, tying thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the breast and legs, gives nearly the same protection and comes off before serving. Smoked bacon will dominate the bird.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids removed, so it will not burn at this oven temperature. Ghee is close, though it is simmered longer and tastes nuttier. Ordinary melted butter in a hot oven for fifteen minutes is liable to scorch and turn bitter.
- Dredge them thickly with flourAn older habit that produces a thin crisp shell over the basted fat. Dust the flour on after the butter, not before, and shake off anything loose or it will bake into a pasty coating.
- Bread sauce and fried crumbsNeither is given here; both are standard in period cookery. Bread sauce is milk infused with onion and clove, thickened with fresh crumbs and finished with butter. The fried crumbs are separate: coarse dry crumbs cooked in butter until brown and crisp, and the recipe has them sifted over the birds before they go to table. The contrast between the two is the whole point of the garnish.
- Skewer and threadA short metal skewer through the legs and tail, then kitchen twine wound round to hold everything tight. Plain butcher's twine and a trussing needle do the job. It keeps the legs from splaying and drying out.
- SourcingFarmed quail usually come already drawn, fresh or frozen, so the singeing and drawing step is often unnecessary; check for pin feathers and stray quills. Wild birds may still need it.
- YieldTwo birds per person as a course, one if it follows something substantial. The recipe gives no number; scale by the size of your roasting dish, keeping the birds in a single uncrowded layer.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, when small game birds were a routine luxury on American hotel menus. The accompaniment here is thoroughly English: bread sauce with fried crumbs is the classic service for roast partridge, grouse and pheasant in British cookery, and it travelled into grand American hotel dining along with the rest of the Anglo-French repertoire that shaped menus of the period. Larding answers to the leanness of wild flesh: it needed fat threaded into it or tied around it to survive a hot oven, and the larding needle was standard equipment in a professional kitchen. Market hunting of wild quail for sale was curtailed in the United States in the decades after this book appeared, though the restrictions came state by state rather than in one sweeping measure, and the birds on a restaurant plate today are farmed.