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Prairie Chickens, Partridges, and Quails
Miss Sarah Page.
Clean nicely, using a little soda in the water in which they are washed; rinse and dry, then fill with dressing, sewing up nicely, binding down the legs and wings with cords. Put in a steamer over hot water, and let them cook until just done. Then place in a pan with a little butter; set in the oven and baste frequently with melted butter until of a nice brown. They ought to brown nicely in about fifteen minutes. Serve on a platter, with sprigs of parsley alternating with currant jelly.
A two-stage method: steam the birds through, then brown them hard in fat. It suits lean wild birds, which dry out badly under a single long roast.
- The hinge is the steamingThe birds are cooked entirely by steam and only coloured in the oven, so "until just done" is the whole recipe. Judge it at the thigh joint rather than by a clock; a quail may need 15-20 minutes, a partridge 25-35, a prairie chicken longer.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; nineteenth-century recipes rarely gave one, and here the oven is only doing the colouring. Use 450F for the browning stage so the skin sets in the quarter-hour stated rather than the flesh overcooking.
- The soda washA pinch of baking soda in the washing water was often recommended for game thought to be strong or slightly high. It is unnecessary with birds in good condition and may soften the skin; a plain rinse and a thorough drying is enough. Dry skin is what browns.
- Stuffing and temperatureA stuffed bird cooks unevenly. Check the centre of the dressing as well as the meat and take both to 165F, or cook the dressing separately in a dish and fill the cavity with an onion half and herbs.
- Trussing"Binding down the legs and wings with cords" means trussing with kitchen twine, which keeps the bird compact in the steamer and helps it cook evenly. Remove the sewing thread and cords before the birds go to the platter.
- ShotWild-shot birds carry pellets. Run a finger through the cavity and along the breast before stuffing; lead shot is still found in older or informally sourced game.
- Which birds you can actually getQuail and partridge are farmed and sold year-round, usually 5-7 oz and 12-16 oz respectively. Prairie chickens are not sold commercially, and greater prairie chicken seasons are closed across most of their former range; a Cornish hen or a small guinea fowl stands in for the size.
- Yield and the garnishAllow one quail per person as a course or two as a main, one partridge for one or two people, and a whole prairie chicken for two. The currant jelly is not decoration but a condiment, and a sharp red currant or a tart cranberry preserve serves the same purpose against lean game.
Miss Sarah Page's contribution belongs to the era when prairie chicken was a market bird as well as a sporting one: greater prairie chickens were shipped in bulk out of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska to eastern markets and hotels through the 1870s and 1880s, and cookbooks of the period treat them as casually as they treat chicken. That trade, along with the ploughing of the tallgrass prairie, is generally credited with the bird's collapse; the closely related heath hen of the eastern seaboard was gone by the early 1930s. The steam-then-brown technique in this recipe is a practical response to lean wild flesh with almost no fat under the skin, and it recurs in nineteenth-century American game cookery. So does the currant jelly, which was a usual accompaniment to game birds on an American table.