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Roasted Quails
To prepare this dish successfully a clear hot open fire is best, but in lieu of that a very hot oven will answer. Pluck, singe and draw the birds, wipe them with a wet towel, cut off the heads and feet. wrap each bird in a slice of fat salted pork, and pack them closely in a saucepan just large enough to hold them. Season the quails highly with salt and cayenne, pour over just enough boiling water to cover them, place the cover on the saucepan, and place it on a hot fire for five or ten minutes. Then take up the quails, remove the pork, wipe the birds on a clean towel, rub them all over with butter and roast them brown before a very hot fire, or in a hot oven, basting them twice with more butter and their drippings. Meanwhile strain the gravy in which they were stewed, and melt it with an equal quantity of red currant jelly to form a sauce, or serve cold red currant jelly with them. Serve the birds hot as soon as they are browned.
A two-stage method: a brief covered simmer to set the flesh and season it through, then a fast, very hot roast for color. The hinge is speed — quail breast is lean and dries out in minutes.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe asks only for "a very hot oven" and gives no figures; in modern terms that is somewhere in the region of 450-475F. Preheat fully; the browning stage should take roughly 8-12 minutes, no more, and the birds are done when the breast reaches about 160F.
- The initial simmerFive to ten minutes covered in boiling water is a blanch, not a braise. It firms the skin and gives you the stock for the sauce. Go the full ten only if the birds are large, and do not let them sit in the water off the heat.
- Fat salt porkSalt pork sold today is often leaner and saltier than the barrel pork of Oscar's day. Thin-sliced unsmoked pork belly or fatback is closer; if you use bacon, the smoke will carry into the stock. Season the birds more lightly than "highly" if your pork is very salty.
- Quail todayFarmed quail weigh roughly 4-6 oz each and are usually sold already plucked and drawn, which removes most of the first stage of work. Semi-boneless quail will overcook faster still — knock two or three minutes off the roast.
- An open fireThe original prefers roasting before an open fire, though it does not say how the birds were rigged. A very hot broiler or a covered grill run at high heat is the nearest modern equivalent, turning once and basting with butter.
- The currant sauceEqual parts strained cooking liquid and red currant jelly makes a thin, sharply sweet glaze-sauce. The stock will be salty from the pork, so reduce it a little before adding the jelly and taste before serving. Cranberry is not a substitute for the tartness.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two birds per person as a main course, one as a first course, is the usual reckoning. Serve immediately, as the recipe directs — quail goes cold and tough on the plate quickly.
Quail were standard restaurant game in the New York of Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf, appearing on menus alongside canvasback duck, snipe and grouse. The technique here "6 larding a lean bird with pork fat, then finishing it fast at high heat and serving it with currant jelly "6 is inherited more or less intact from English game cookery, where tart fruit jellies had accompanied roast birds for centuries. Oscar's insistence that "a clear hot open fire is best" is a hotel man writing in an era when he still remembered spit-roasting as the standard against which ovens were measured.