Quails

History

Quails is recipe No. 24 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), among Abby Fisher's roast meats. The entry is short and practical: "When roasted, make nice toast, butter it nice and send quails to table on the toast. Do not forget to baste all game and fowls while cooking, so as to make them juicy. Make stuffing same as for chicken." The instruction to baste is general advice she attaches here for all game and fowl — a cook's aside, set down as she dictated it.

Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She could neither read nor write and dictated the book, drawing on "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years." Her cooking carried public standing: a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880. The book is among the earliest cookbooks by an African American author and the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866).

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular preparation. It survives as Fisher set it down, under her own name.

Ingredients

• quails
• toast
• butter
• stuffing

Instructions

1. Prepare stuffing using the same method as for chicken.
2. Roast the quails, basting them frequently throughout cooking to keep them juicy.
3. Make nice toast and butter it well.
4. Arrange the roasted quails on the buttered toast.
5. Send to table.