Larded Quail
The directions for cooking and serving a quail are the same as those for grouse, only quails cook in fourteen minutes. All dry-meated birds are cooked in this way. Larding is to give richness to dry meat that does not have fat enough of its own.
A cross-reference rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you have already read the grouse entry and only wants to fix the timing and explain the fat. Here is what that shorthand means in a modern kitchen.
- The hinge is heat, not timeFourteen minutes implies a hot oven, but the book gives no temperature here; that would come from the grouse entry it refers back to. At a moderate oven a quail is unlikely to be cooked through in fourteen minutes.
- What larding actually isStrips of firm salt pork or fatback, cut about a quarter inch square and chilled, threaded through the surface of the breast with a larding needle. The fat melts into the meat as it roasts. If you have no larding needle, bard instead: drape thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the breast and tie them on, removing them for the last few minutes to let the skin colour.
- Why quail needs itQuail breast is almost fatless and the bird is small enough to lose moisture fast. The book's last sentence is the whole reasoning behind the section, and it applies equally to partridge, pheasant breast and rabbit.
- Size and yieldA dressed quail runs 4 to 6 ounces. Count two per person as a main course, one as a first course.
- DonenessFarmed quail is poultry and should reach 165F at the thickest part of the thigh; the breast will read a little lower. Game birds were commonly served underdone in this period, which may be part of why the timing looks short.
- SourcingAlmost all quail sold now is farmed and comes fully dressed, so the hanging and drawing the older grouse recipes assume is unnecessary. Wild birds may carry shot; check the breast before larding, since a pellet will turn a larding needle.
- SaltSalt pork and fatback vary enormously in saltiness. Taste a shaving before you decide how much to season the bird itself.
Larding is a French butchery technique long attested in English cookery, and by the time this book was compiled the larding needle was familiar equipment in households that cooked game. Quail here probably means the American bobwhite, which was sold in city markets through the second half of the nineteenth century alongside grouse, plover and woodcock. That commercial trade in wild game was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900 and by the state laws that followed, which is often said to be part of why game sections shrank and then vanished from American cookbooks over the next generation. The entry's brevity is itself telling: the author expects a reader who already knows how to roast a grouse and needs only to be told that a smaller bird cooks faster.