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Quail, Roasted, on Canapes
Pick, singe, cut the legs and heads off six nice fat quail; draw and wipe well; arrange a thin slice of lard on the breasts of each bird. Sprinkle half teaspoon salt over them, evenly divided. Lay them on a small roasting pan. Set the pan in a brisk oven and roast for fifteen minutes. Dress them on six canapes, decorate with a little watercress around the dish and serve.
A short, fast roast that depends almost entirely on the barding fat and a genuinely hot oven. The whole thing takes under twenty minutes once the birds are prepared.
- Brisk ovenA brisk oven in this period corresponds to roughly 400-450F; let the oven come fully up to temperature before the pan goes in. At a lower heat the birds dry out before they colour, and quail have almost no fat of their own to protect them.
- "A thin slice of lard"This means a sheet of pork back fat or fatback laid over the breast, in the French sense of lard as pork fat (fresh or cured), not rendered lard from a tub. Thin-sliced salt pork or unsmoked streaky bacon does the same job; tie or skewer it in place.
- Fifteen minutes is rightQuail are small enough that the original timing holds; carried much past twenty minutes the birds turn dry and livery. Rest them five minutes before dressing.
- CanapesIn this period a canape under game is a slice of bread, crusts off, fried in butter or brushed with fat and toasted until crisp — one per bird, cut a little larger than the quail so the juices soak in. Not a cold cocktail canape.
- Buying and cleaningFarmed quail come plucked and drawn, so "pick, singe, draw" is already done. If you are working with birds from a hunter, singeing over a flame removes the fine hairs and down left after plucking, and any shot should be located and removed.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt across six birds is light by modern taste, especially with salt pork on top. Season inside the cavity as well, and add black pepper, which the recipe omits.
- YieldSix quail serves three as a main course or six as a first course. The birds are often eaten with the fingers; a spoonful of the pan juices poured over the toast is worth the extra minute.
Quail on toast is one of the standard nineteenth-century restaurant treatments of small game birds, and the arrangement here — bird, fat cap, fried bread, watercress — is straight out of the French professional repertoire that shaped American hotel cooking. The fried bread base, called a canape or croute, exists to catch the juices, which are the best part of a bird this small; the watercress is the classic garnish for roast game, its pepperiness set against the rich meat. Wild quail were widely marketed in the United States in this era, sold by the dozen in city game shops; the market hunting that supplied them was curtailed in the early twentieth century, and quail sold today is almost entirely farmed.