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Quails Jardiniere
Draw and truss the quails, and place them in a stewpan with some thin slices of fat bacon, one breakfast cupful of mirepoix, and one teacupful of Madeira; stew them gently until cooked. Butter a plain border mould, fill it with braised cabbage-lettuces and press them tightly down. Turn the border out on a hot dish, and fill the center with cooked carrots, turnips and French beans; arrange the quails, resting half on the borders and half on the vegetables, brush them and the border over with melted glaze, and serve with a sauceboatful of melted glaze.
A composed Waldorf presentation piece: braised quail set against a moulded ring of lettuce and a jumble of cut vegetables. Most of the difficulty is in timing the three parts to finish together.
- Cook the birds brieflyFarmed quail weigh about 4-6 oz and cook through in roughly 15-20 minutes of gentle stewing. "Stew gently until cooked" gives no time, and small farmed birds will be done sooner than larger ones, so start checking early; cook them through rather than leaving the breast pink.
- Mirepoix means something older hereIn a kitchen of this period a mirepoix was a braising preparation in its own right -- diced carrot, onion and celery cooked down with diced fat bacon or raw ham, thyme and bay, often moistened with wine. It is the braising bed, not a raw vegetable garnish.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cup is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so about one cup of mirepoix; a teacup is smaller, about 5-6 fl oz of Madeira. Use a dry or medium-dry Madeira, not a sweet one.
- Glaze"Melted glaze" is glace de viande -- brown veal or game stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold and melts to a gloss when warmed. Reduced demi-glace or a heavily reduced brown stock does the same work. A sauceboat of it is the entire sauce, so it must be well seasoned and not over-reduced to bitterness.
- Cabbage-lettucesThese are firm-headed lettuces, closest today to butterhead or the hearts of romaine. Blanch, refresh, squeeze dry, then braise in stock with a little bacon before packing them into the mould; wet lettuce will not hold the border together.
- The border mouldA plain ring mould, buttered, packed tight and left a few minutes to settle before turning out. A savarin tin or any straight-sided ring pan works. Serve the dish hot from the moment it is unmoulded -- it will not stand.
- Jardiniere cutThe name refers to the garden vegetables in the centre. Cut carrots and turnips to uniform batons or turn them into small ovals, and cook each vegetable separately so the beans stay green and the turnips do not collapse.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of birds. Two quail per person for a main course and one as a first course is the usual reckoning, so scale the number to the size of your mould and the company.
Anything labelled jardinière in a turn-of-the-century hotel kitchen signalled the same thing: a garnish of spring vegetables, cut to a uniform size and cooked apart so each kept its own colour, arranged for effect rather than folded in. Quail were a standing fixture of American restaurant menus in the 1890s, when market hunting still supplied wild birds by the barrel to city dealers, and they were often presented in this ornamental register -- moulded borders, mirrored glaze, the bird propped rather than plated. The technique of setting food against a rice, lettuce or forcemeat border and lacquering it with glace de viande comes straight out of the Carême-to-Escoffier line of French service, and it explains why the recipe assumes a cook with reduced stock already on hand; a hotel brigade would have been expected to keep glaze in the larder as a matter of course. Wild quail have since given way almost entirely to farmed birds, which are generally said to be milder and quicker to cook.