No. 2135

Quails with Risot

Cailles au Risot

Draw four or five singed quails, bone the breasts from the inside of the birds and fill in the empty space with baked forcemeat (No.81), mingled with a little raw quenelle forcemeat (No.91) and having chopped truffles added. Truss the quails, fry in a sautoir with butter, season and moisten with Madeira wine and gravy (No.404), reduce this liquid to half and finish cooking them smothered. At the last moment drain off, untruss and split each one lengthwise in two, then dress on a risot (No.739). Strain the stock, remove its fat and pour it over the birds.

← No. 2134 Quails with Mushrooms—Stuffed Quail, Snipe, Woodcock & Small Birds No. 2136 California Quails a la Monterey →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stock pot always going and a numbered reference for every component, so the work here is mostly in reading the cross-references and substituting sensibly. The dish itself is a straightforward braise served on rice.

The hinge: bone from the insideThe breastbone is lifted out through the body cavity so the bird keeps its shape and skin intact, then the hollow is packed with forcemeat. Semi-boneless farmed quail, sold with the ribcage and keel already removed and the leg and wing bones left in, are exactly this and save the fiddliest twenty minutes.
SautoirA straight-sided saut he the birds in one layer. Any heavy skillet or shallow braiser with a lid works.
"Smothered"Ranhofer means covered and finished over gentle heat in the reduced liquid — a short braise, not a stew. Whole quail need roughly 12 to 18 minutes after browning; they are small and dry out fast once past done.
The forcemeatsNo. 81 is Ranhofer's baked forcemeat and No. 91 his raw quenelle forcemeat; consult both cross-references for their actual composition. A modern equivalent is a firm chicken or veal mousseline (breast, egg white, cream) folded into a cooked forcemeat or panade, with chopped truffle or, failing that, saut a little truffle oil.
Gravy No. 404Not pan drippings — Ranhofer's jus is a reduced brown stock. Use a good reduced brown stock; a thin canned broth will not give the glossy, coating liquid the recipe expects when reduced by half.
RisotThe French form of the Italian risotto. Recipe No. 739 is Ranhofer's plain rice cooked in stock; check the cross-reference for the exact treatment.
MadeiraUse a dry to medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho), not the salted "cooking Madeira" sold in supermarkets, which will make the reduced sauce aggressively salty at half volume.
Doneness and servingFarmed quail breast is best just rosy, but this bird is stuffed with a raw-bound forcemeat, so the filling must reach 165F throughout. Four or five stuffed quail, split, make a course for four; as a main with the risotto, count two birds a person.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in a thousand pages of cross-references. Quail were a staple of the American market-game trade in his day, sold by the barrel alongside snipe, woodcock and plover — a whole section of the book is given over to them — and the birds a Delmonico's cook boned would generally have been wild-shot. That commerce ended as state laws closed down market hunting; the quail available now are farmed, mostly Coturnix, and are milder and fattier than the wild bobwhite Ranhofer knew. The risotto beneath is worth noting too: Italian cooking was still marginal in English-language cookbooks of the 1890s, but a rice cooked in stock and finished with Parmesan had long since been absorbed into the grand French repertoire, which is why it turns up here Frenchified as risot and treated as an ordinary garnish.