quail – Gourmet Project

The recipe

I like to think of quail and lobster as perverse challenges on a Japanese game show. They’re complicated and messy to eat, but you’re challenged to do it in your finery with your peers looking on. I can imagine the quiet golf claps from the spectators as you deftly separate the leg joint, and the derision of the judges and jeers from the peanut gallery as you forget your manners and start gnawing on the wings. There are loads of public forums for messy lobster eating, where plastic bibs rule and squirting lobster juice into your dining companions’ hair is considered to be all part of the fun, but very few community organizations seem to throw an annual quail bash, so I prefer to keep small fowl eating confined to my home.

These quail are supposed to be semiboneless, where your butcher has removed all but the wing bones, and the drumstick. I’m sure that would make the eating a lot neater, but it probably costs an arm and a leg, so we ripped our meat off the bone with our teeth thank-you-very-much. The boned out quail are cut in half, rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne, and allspice, then chilled for a hour, and cooked under the broiler. The quail are served with a gastrique made with chicken stock, lime juice, molasses, scallions, and butter.

The Good: These quail were just delicious. The spice rub did very nice things for them, quail are fairly flavourful birds, so they were able to stand up to the allspice and cayenne. The quick broiling they received was a really nice way to cook them. Unlike chicken you’ve got to cook them as quickly as possible to get the outside nicely crisped before the meat gets overdone, intense direct heat from the broiler seems to be the ideal solution. They’d probably work well quickly grilled over an intense flame.

The Bad: While there was nothing wrong with the gastrique, I thought it was more or less unnecessary. The quail were a complete package on their own, they weren’t begging for an acidic caramel sauce. I tried some of the gastrique with the quail, and it just covered up some of the bird’s deliciousness. Sometimes I think people make gastriques more because they look nice drizzled decoratively on the plate, or painted on with bold brush strokes than any underlying culinary theory. In this case they didn’t do much for the quail, so I’d skip it. However it might depend on what you’re serving it with, a sweet and acidic sauce like this can go a long way towards tying a meal together.

The Verdict: Make the birds, skip the sauce, eat with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about making a mess.

110. Moroccan-Style Roast Cornish Hens with Vegetables p.392

The recipe

This was my first experiment with Cornish hens, and I think I’m in love. I watched an episode of Freaks and Geeks the other night. In one scene the mother roasts Cornish hens, and serves them to her skeptical family, who use the hens as puppets for a dance routine, and complain that they want normal food, like chicken. Two things, 1) Cornish hens are chickens, and 2) that show was awesome, it really bugged me when they canceled it. That episode was poking fun at the status of little birds as icons of the ’70’s and 80’s food revolution, for both good and ill. My dining companion’s mother talks about fancy dinner parties in the early 80’s where the women wore long gloves, and were asked to pick apart quail with a knife and fork. She remembers going home hungry a lot. Game birds are often considered exotic or fancy food, but at least for Cornish hens, they’re just conveniently sized chickens.

This dish emphasized how casual and delicious a Cornish hen can be. You start by making a spice mixture of caraway, salt, garlic, honey, lemon juice, olive oil, paprika, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, cayenne, and pepper. Then you cube zucchini, turnips, red peppers, butternut squash, and onions, toss them in with half the spice mix, chopped tomatoes, and chicken stock. You then take the backbones out of the hens and halve them, toss them in the spice mix, and lay them in a roasting pan on top of the vegetables. The whole thing goes into a 425 oven covered in foil for an hour, then uncovered for the last half hour to let the birds brown up.

There were a lot of ingredients to the dish, but most of them were in the cupboard. There was a good deal of prep work to be done, particularly taking a rock-hard butternut squash apart, and peeling turnip, but nothing too complicated. The results were absolutely fantastic. The use of smaller Cornish hens makes this dish possible. A full sized chicken might not get cooked through before the veg turned to mush, but with little birds everything comes out together. The juices drip off the birds and flavour the vegetables, which in turn perfume the hens.

I’ve been pretty harsh to the middle eastern / north African dishes I’ve made thus far. I just can’t get behind sweetened meat dishes. This one however, had dollop of honey, carefully balanced with lots of spice and some more harshly flavoured vegetables like the turnips. The little sweet note of honey was much appreciated, it was present but not too assertive.

This dish was just delicious, I couldn’t get enough of it. I couldn’t wait for lunch time, so I had some left-overs for breakfast. The Hens were perfectly roasted with an amazingly crisp skin and juicy tender inside. They were dense and meaty, with a deep chicken flavour. The vegetables roasted wonderfully, and the spice mix was an excellent compliment to all the flavours in this dish. I’d happily make this again and again. Moroccan-style roast Cornish hens with vegetables, you’ve earned your five mushroom rating.