Roast Quails
Stuff, place on their backs close together in a roasting pan and put in a very hot oven. As soon as they are nicely browned, baste with mushroom or some simple sauce. Quail will roast in about thirty minutes.
A terse set of directions that assumes you already know how to dress and stuff a small bird. The only number given — thirty minutes — is the one to ignore.
- "A very hot oven"Read this as 450-475F. The method depends on high, dry heat to brown the skin before the breast meat overcooks.
- Thirty minutes is too longFarmed quail weigh 4-6 oz dressed and are done in 12-18 minutes at 450F, or when the thigh reaches about 165F. Half an hour produces dry, stringy breast.
- The stuffingNo stuffing is specified; the direction simply assumes you have a forcemeat to hand. Keep it to a tablespoon or two per bird -- a packed cavity slows the heat and forces a longer roast, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
- "Close together" is deliberate"Close together" -- Birds crowded so they touch shield each other's sides and lose moisture more slowly. Use a pan just large enough to hold them shoulder to shoulder rather than a large sheet pan.
- Basting and browningThe birds have almost no fat of their own, so there is nothing to baste with until you add something. Brush with melted butter before they go in, and use the mushroom sauce only once they have colored, as the recipe says — sauce added at the start steams the skin instead.
- SourcingSupermarket quail are farm-raised coturnix, usually sold frozen in multi-bird packs, and are what this recipe now means. Wild bobwhite quail are governed by hunting seasons and bag limits.
- YieldTwo birds per person as a main course, one as a first course or on toast.
Quail appear in American cookbooks of this period as a matter of course, in a game chapter alongside venison, wild duck and often reed-birds and plover — birds that market hunters supplied to city butchers by the barrel before the Lacey Act of 1900 and the migratory bird laws that followed dismantled the commercial trade, a collapse that applies most directly to the reed-birds and plover; quail, not being migratory, were regulated by the states. That is why the instructions are so brief: game birds were familiar enough at market that a cook needed no persuading to try them. The bird's smallness dictates everything here — the crowded pan, the very hot oven, the basting with a ready-made sauce rather than pan drippings, since a quail yields almost none. Serving them on toast was the standard treatment; the bread caught what little juice there was.