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Broiled Chickens or Quails
Cut chicken open on the back, lay on the meat-board and pound until it will lie flat, lay on gridiron, place over a bed of coals, broil until a nice brown, but do not burn. It will take twenty or thirty minutes to cook thoroughly, and it will cook much better to cover with a pie-tin held down with a weight so that all parts of the chicken may lie close to the gridiron. While the chicken is broiling, put the liver, gizzard and heart in a stew-pan and boil in a pint of water until tender, chop fine and add flour, butter, pepper, salt, and stir a cup of sweet cream to the water in which they were boiled; when the chicken is done, dip it in this gravy while hot, lay it back on the gridiron a minute, put it in the gravy and let boil for a half minute, and send to the table hot. Cook quails in the same way. - Mrs. A. S. Chapman.
This is spatchcocked chicken under a weight, cooked over live coals, with a giblet cream gravy made alongside. The technique translates directly to a charcoal grill or a heavy skillet.
- The hinge: press it flatSplitting along the backbone and flattening the bird is what makes the timing work; a weighted pie tin does the same job as a foil-wrapped brick. Full contact with the grate is the whole point, otherwise the thighs are raw when the breast is done.
- Gridiron and coalsA gridiron is a grate set over a bed of coals burnt down to grey-ashed, not flaming. Aim for medium heat, skin side down first, and expect flare-ups from rendering fat; move the bird rather than dousing it.
- Twenty to thirty minutesThat holds for a small 2 to 3 lb bird of the period. A modern 4 lb supermarket chicken, spatchcocked, wants closer to 40 to 50 minutes, and the thickest part of the thigh should read 165F.
- Quails cook in a fraction of the timeDo not read "the same way" as the same duration. A quail is done in 8 to 12 minutes total over coals; at twenty minutes it is dry through.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means unsoured, as opposed to soured cream, which many households also had on hand. Use heavy or whipping cream; light cream will thin the gravy and is more likely to break.
- The giblet gravyLiver, gizzard and heart simmered in a pint of water gives both the meat and the stock. Flour and butter are given without quantity; a tablespoon of each will only lightly thicken a pint of liquid plus a cup of cream, so scale up if you want a coating gravy. Add the liver late, since it turns grainy with long boiling.
- The dip-and-return stepDipping the hot bird in the gravy, returning it to the fire for a minute, then finishing it in the gravy is a glazing trick. Keep the gravy hot but do not let it boil hard once the cream is in.
- YieldOne flattened chicken serves two to three; allow one or two quails per person.
Broiling over a gridiron was a common way to cook a small bird in an American kitchen before gas ranges made overhead broilers common, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s often treat chicken and quail as interchangeable under the same heading, since both arrived small and young. The Dixie Cook Book, like many compilations of its era, is built from contributed recipes signed by the women who sent them in, which is why the instructions read as one cook's spoken habit rather than a standardized formula: no oven temperature, no measured flour, and an assumption that the reader knows what a bed of coals looks like. The pie tin and weight are a household version of what is now sold as a grill press, and the same idea appears in Italian cooking as pollo al mattone, chicken under a brick. Quail were still shot in quantity across the South in this period and appeared regularly on domestic tables; today the quail sold at market are farmed, since the sale of wild-taken game is generally prohibited.