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Quails, Robbins
Pick six nice fat quails, cut off heads and feet, neatly draw and wipe. Place in a bowl three tablespoons pate de fois gras, add a teaspoon rum and half saltspoon cayenne, mix well, then evenly divide preparation in interior of the six quails. Truss and lay on a tin, season with a teaspoon salt, arrange a very thin slice larding pork over each bird and set in a brisk oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, take out out lard, untruss and place in a cocotte dish, pour in three-quarters gill sherry and place cover on. Make a stiff dough with a little flour and water, roll out dough on table, string-like, then fasten it around joints of cover and dish so as to prevent evaporation. Set dish in oven for twenty-five minutes, remove, place dish on another over a folded napkin and send to table without uncovering.
A sealed-pot game dish from the era when quail was a market bird. The whole point is the luted lid: nothing escapes, so the birds steam in sherry and their own fat and arrive at the table still perfumed.
- The hinge: do not open the potThe dough rope is a seal, not decoration, and the dish is meant to be broken open in front of the diners. If you lift the lid in the kitchen to check, you lose the aromatic steam that is the entire effect.
- MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so three-quarters gill of sherry is about 6 tablespoons (3 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "half saltspoon cayenne" about an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Oven temperaturesA brisk oven is usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F for the initial fifteen-minute searing. The book does not specify heat for the second stage; a moderate 350F suits a sealed cocotte for the remaining twenty-five minutes.
- Total time is generousForty minutes is a long haul for farmed quail of 4-5 oz, which are cooked through in roughly half that. Expect fully braised, falling-apart birds rather than pink breast meat; if you want them juicier, shorten the sealed stage and accept that the dish is then a braise in name only.
- Larding porkThis is unsmoked fatback or fresh salt pork, sliced paper-thin as a barding sheet. Thin-cut unsmoked streaky bacon is the nearest supermarket substitute. It is removed and discarded after the first roasting, so its job is purely to protect the breasts.
- Vessels"A tin" is a shallow roasting pan. The cocotte is a lidded casserole or small Dutch oven, ideally just large enough to hold six birds in one layer so the small amount of sherry is not lost to a wide surface.
- The luting pasteFlour and water rolled into a rope and pressed around the rim; make it stiff, like a firm pasta dough, or it slumps and breaks the seal. It bakes hard and is peeled off and thrown away, not eaten.
- PâtéThree tablespoons of foie gras pâté divides to about half a tablespoon per bird, which is a flavouring rather than a stuffing. Any good coarse liver pâté works; use a ready-cooked product, not raw liver, since the interior of a stuffed quail cooks unevenly.
- YieldSix quail serves three as a main course or six as a first course. Serve straight from the cocotte, set on a plate over a folded napkin as directed, with the sherry juices spooned over.
This belongs to the hotel-and-club French of turn-of-the-century New York, where dishes were routinely named for the patrons who ordered them and cooks like Alexander Filippini set them down by the hundred; "Robbins" is most likely such a name rather than a place or a technique. The method itself is the familiar one of the luted cocotte: sealing a lid with a rope of flour-and-water paste so that a small bird cooks in trapped steam and wine, a trick of French kitchens before it reached American cookbooks, and one that also let a waiter carry the dish to the table intact. Quail was still a market commodity in this period, shipped and sold by the dozen and served famously as "quail on toast"; the Lacey Act of 1900 began the federal squeeze on the market-game trade by barring interstate shipment of game taken in breach of state law, though the traffic was only fully closed off by later legislation, and the quail sold today is farmed, generally smaller and leaner than the "nice fat" wild birds the recipe assumes.