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Quails En Cocotte
Pick very carefully six fat, fresh quails, then singe, cut off necks, wings and feet, draw, neatly wipe, stuff insides with American stuffing and tie all around. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, arrange a thin slice larding pork on breast of each bird and place in a lightly buttered cocotte dish. Add a finely chopped onion, teaspoon crushed allspice, baste them with a little melted butter, then set in oven for twenty minutes, occasionally basting meanwhile. Remove, lift up from dish, take out contents of cocotte dish, then return quails to the cocotte, add a potato noisette and half pint well-drained canned green peas.
Finely chop one-third bean garlic and two branches parsley and sprinkle over cocotte. Pour in a quarter gill white wine, half gill each broth and demi-glace, cover dish, set in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A French-style covered-braise applied to small game birds, written for a cook who already knows the book's stock and stuffing recipes. Most of the work is translating the kitchen French and cutting the cooking time.
- The cocotteHere it means the vessel: a squat lidded casserole of enameled iron or earthenware, just large enough to hold the six birds in one layer. A 10-inch Dutch oven with a well-fitting lid works.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The initial uncovered browning-and-basting stage wants a hot oven, 425F; once the lid goes on with wine, broth and demi-glace, drop to 350F.
- Cut the timeForty-five minutes total will leave farmed quail dry and grainy. Fifteen minutes uncovered to color, then 12-15 minutes covered, is closer; the birds are done at 165F in the thigh and the breast should still be faintly pink.
- Liquid measuresA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill of white wine is 2 tablespoons and half a gill each of broth and demi-glace is 1/4 cup apiece. That is a scant amount by design — this is a braise that finishes as a glaze, not a stew.
- Larding pork and "bean garlic"Larding pork is fresh pork fatback, thinly sliced; unsmoked salt pork or thin pancetta substitutes, though salt pork means cutting back the seasoning salt. "One-third bean garlic" is a third of a clove -- a pinch of minced garlic, well under a teaspoon.
- Potato noisettePotatoes cut into hazelnut-sized balls with a small scoop and browned in butter until nearly tender before they join the cocotte. The recipe gives no quantity; they will not soften properly if added raw to so little liquid.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy. A commercial demi-glace concentrate or 1/4 cup of strongly reduced brown stock gives the same body; ordinary broth alone will not coat.
- The peasCanned peas are already fully cooked. Drain them thoroughly and add at the second stage as directed — any earlier and they collapse into the sauce.
- YieldSix quails serve three as a main course, or six as a first course. Buy them semi-boneless if you would rather not deal with the drawing and singeing described here; supermarket quail arrive dressed.
Quail cooked en cocotte belongs to the restaurant repertoire that flowed into American cookbooks in the early twentieth century, when the small covered casserole became a fashionable way to serve birds — game brought to the table in its own vessel, sealed with its garnish and a spoonful of demi-glace. The vocabulary here is entirely professional French, from the pommes noisette to the demi-glace itself, but the stuffing is the book's own "American stuffing," which is the sort of hybrid that titles like The International Cook Book traded in: continental method, domestic filling. The market trade in wild quail was contracting in this period, as state law and the Lacey Act era closed down the sale of wild game birds; the near-total shift to farmed birds followed, as game laws tightened and commercial quail raising took hold, which is why a modern cook gets a smaller, more tender bird than the "six fat, fresh quails" the recipe assumes and should cook it for less time.