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Quails En Casserole
The French casserole as used here, which is about the shape of a rose jar with ears for handles and a cover, is of earthenware and finished inside with a deep red glaze. In use they ensure slow, even cooking and are usually sent to the table just as they come from the oven.
Singe, draw and prepare as many quail as needed. For half dozen cut six ounces of fat salt pork very fine, put in the casserole and place at the side of the fire until the fat is partly melted. Arrange on it the quail which have been wiped, salt, pepper and a half teaspoonful of butter placed inside each one, then trussed; cover and place in a moderate oven for one hour and a quarter. の
A simple pot-roast of small birds in rendered pork fat. Two things need attention: the vessel described is not a modern casserole dish, and the cooking time will destroy the birds.
- The casseroleHere the word means the covered earthenware pot itself, not a baked dish. Any lidded stoneware or enamelled cast-iron pot that holds six birds snugly in one layer does the same work; the point is slow, even heat and a tight cover.
- That deep red glazeAntique red and orange earthenware glazes frequently contain lead, which leaches into food under heat and acid. Decorative vintage casseroles should stay decorative. Use modern cookware rated for oven use.
- Moderate ovenRead it as 350F. The recipe relies on the covered pot to keep the birds moist rather than on any browning.
- The timing is the problemAn hour and a quarter is far too long for quail. Modern farmed quail weigh roughly 4-5 oz dressed and are done in about 20-25 minutes covered at 350F, with the thigh at 165F. Held for over an hour they go dry and stringy no matter how much fat surrounds them.
- Sourcing the birds"Singe, draw and prepare" assumes undrawn birds still needing their pinfeathers singed off and their innards removed. Farmed quail come dressed; check the cavity for stray shot only if the birds are wild.
- Fat salt porkSix ounces of hard fatback or unsmoked salt pork, diced fine. Salt pork varies a good deal in saltiness, so hold back on the seasoning until you taste the pan fat. Bacon works but brings smoke the dish does not want.
- Butter insideThe half teaspoon of butter in each cavity bastes the bird from within as it melts. Worth keeping, and worth trussing properly so it does not run straight out.
- YieldSix quail serve three as a main course or six as a first course. Serve straight from the pot with the pork fat and juices spooned over toast or polenta.
Quail were still an everyday market bird in America at the turn of the twentieth century, sold by the brace in city stalls and shot in enormous numbers across the South and Midwest; the collapse of that trade came with the tightening of hunting regulation in the following decades, and quail today reach the kitchen from farms rather than from a gun. The recipe's opening paragraph is really an advertisement for a piece of equipment: French glazed earthenware was fashionable in American kitchens of the period, and cookbook writers took pains to explain what a casserole was. Cooking small game shut under a lid in pork fat is much older than the pot, a technique generally traced to the French practice of cooking birds en cocotte, where fat and a sealed vessel stand in for the barding and basting that an open spit would demand.