No. 2131

Quails Roasted

Cailles Roties

After they have been plucked and drawn, singe and cut off the end of the claws; truss and cover the breasts, first with a grape leaf buttered over with a brush, and then with a thin slice of fat pork; run them on small skewers and fasten them to the spit; baste over with melted butter and let cook for fourteen to sixteen minutes then salt; take off and untruss, or they may be put in a baking pan sprinkled with butter and cooked in a hot oven. Dress each one on a crust covered with a layer of baking forcemeat with foies-gras (No.78), and serve at the same time some clear gravy (No.404).

← No. 2130 Quails in Papers Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2132 Quails, Salmis Of, a la Morisini →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a spit, a larder full of caul and barding pork, and two cross-referenced preparations from elsewhere in The Epicurean. The dish resolves easily into a hot-oven roast, but the barding and the very short cooking time are what keep the birds from drying out.

The hinge: keep the breast coveredA buttered grape leaf under a sheet of fat pork is not decoration. Quail breast is lean and thin and will be dry before the legs are done; the leaf holds moisture against the skin and the pork bastes it. Salt pork, thinly sliced pancetta or plain bacon all work, tied on with kitchen twine.
Oven temperatureRanhofer gives no numbers, only "a hot oven"; in a modern oven that is usually taken as roughly 425-450F. At that heat the fourteen to sixteen minutes he gives for spit-roasting is a reasonable starting point for the pan method too, on a rack or in a shallow pan so the birds do not steam.
DonenessQuail is classically served with the breast still faintly pink, which is what a fifteen-minute roast produces. If you want the USDA poultry standard, that is 165F in the thigh, and the breast will be firm rather than juicy. Uncover the birds for the last three or four minutes if you want colour.
Salt at the endRanhofer salts after cooking, not before. The barding pork is itself salty, so taste it first and season accordingly.
Sourcing the birdsThese are farmed coturnix quail today, four to six ounces dressed and sold cleaned. Ranhofer's cook was plucking and drawing wild birds; "singe" refers to burning off residual down over a flame, which a modern packaged bird will not need.
The crustA "crust" here is a croûton -- a slice of crustless white bread, cut to the size of the bird and fried golden in clarified butter. It catches the juices and is meant to be eaten.
The cross-referencesNo. 78 is a baking forcemeat with foie gras; No. 404 is a clear gravy. A smooth chicken-liver or foie gras mousse on the croûton and a well-reduced brown poultry jus give the same effect without two further recipes.
YieldNo serving count is given. Two quail per person is a main course; one on its croûton is a first course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, across two spells, for close to thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working repertoire written down, with some three and a half thousand numbered items cross-referencing one another as they would in a brigade kitchen. Quail appear in a long section alongside snipe and woodcock because in the second half of the nineteenth century small wild birds were ordinary market goods in American cities, sold in quantity; the market hunting that supplied them was curtailed over the following decades by state game laws and, for the migratory species in that section such as snipe and woodcock, by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Restaurant quail is now a farmed product. The grape leaf under the barding fat follows older French practice with small birds, the same logic that wraps ortolan and figpecker.