Guirlande de Suprêmes en Gelée

 In the introduction for this dish, Price tells us at the Hostellerie de la Poste they make it with quail, and garnish the dish with their heads, which Price sort of brushes off and claims he’d  “. . . sooner have it without the heads.”  Oh come on—you were in House of Wax and The Tingler. You put quail heads on everything.

This is the first truly complicated dish in the Treasury of Great Recipes. It covers an entire page and uses exceptional ingredients. It requires you to make aspic. And forcemeat. And build an aspic ring, top-down in a mold.

It’s also one of the recipes where Price changes the ingredients and gives us a window into mid 20th century America, where getting fresh quail may not have been as easy as trolling through the frozen poultry section at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.

In Florida, where I grew up, we had Bobwhite quail. You could hear them in the morning, and their call really did sound like they were calling out “Bob White!?” incredulously, like they ran into him walking down the street and couldn’t believe it.

Quail are delicious.

My grandfather raised quail for a little while to sell to local bird dog trainers. He had a small greenhouse with about 30 bobwhites and every morning it was a chorus of hailing, which woke up the dog (he had a blue tick hound named Champ) and pretty much everyone else in the neighborhood.

But quail were not so common back in 1965 so Price swapped them out with chicken. I’m adding the quail back in with a few caveats and instructions for you to do some damn research. A quail is a very different bird than a chicken. It has less fat. More flavor. More nutrition. And it’s smaller. So you might need to adjust your salt, your fats, and the number of quail. In Chicago, you get them at Alliance. They don’t have a website, so here’s this.

In Guirlande de Suprêmes en Gelée, Price swaps the quail for chicken breasts. I’m going to deliver the recipe as is but I strongly urge you to use quail instead. And if you get them whole, roast the heads a little and use them as a garnish. If you use quail, swap the cheesecloth for twine when you braise them.

Finally, it’s the first recipe in which there is a mistake, albeit a tiny one. Price tells us to make the aspic thusly:

Gradually beat in the cool chicken stock.

But the chicken stock has not been mentioned previously and I have no idea how much to beat in. Since it is supposed to end up as a quart, I guess I’ll have to add it in slowly and eyeball the damn thing.

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