Whisk Wednesdays—Cailles à la Normande (Quail with Cream and Apples)

Here is a challenging recipe. First, you need to find quail. [Plus you need to forget how tiny and cute they are.] Then, you need to have veal stock in your freezer or make some, which means finding veal bones that are just as difficult to source as quail. [Plus you must get over your guilt about veal.] Next, you need to find fatback, or "pork back fat" as my butcher called it. If you can, you must find crème fraîche, or make it yourself the day before, which I forgot to do. Finally, you have to find Calvados, an apple brandy from Normandy in France. I'm sure all these ingredients are much easier to find in the heart of France and not in the Canadian Shield of Ontario.

Luckily, Ottawa has a wonderful butcher (Glebe Meat Market) where I was able to buy "jumbo quail". [They still look tiny to me.] Plus I have veal stock in the freezer that I made recently. A different butcher (The Butchery) always carries fat back, so I bought more than I needed the last time I was there. As for the Calvados, on one of my foodie field trips last week, I was in Quebec and stopped in at a wine store. Just as I was about to purchase a large bottle of Calvados, I saw they had minis! The only thing I can't buy locally is crème fraîche, and I should have made my own. I used heavy cream instead, and my sauce wasn't thick enough.

After you have all the ingredients, making this dish isn't hard and only requires a baking pan for the apples and toast and a roasting pan for the quail.

Here's a quick summary of the steps:
Bake lemon- and butter-rubbed apples.
Toast buttered bread.
Season quail with salt and pepper.
Tie fatback onto quail breast.
Sauté quail.
Roast quail and set aside.
Flambé Calvados.
Deglaze pan with crème fraîche and veal stock.
Reduce sauce.
Broil sugar-sprinkled apples.
Garnish with chopped parsley.

Recipe

Serves 6 (picture shows half a recipe)

6 quail, necks removed and reserved
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 thin slice fatback, 12 by 5 inches
6 small Golden Delicious apples
½ lemon
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
6 slices firm white bread
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons Calvados or domestic apple brandy
½ cup crème fraîche or heavy cream
¼ cup Brown Veal stock
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon parsley, chopped
You can find the recipe for Cailles à la Normande (Quail with Cream and Apples) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home. To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with their recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
Quail are tiny. This sauce needs crème fraîche. The best part was the Calvados. I'm glad I bought more than one mini of Calvados so that I can enjoy Le Trou Normand with the remaining bottles and pretend I'm in the heart of Normandy.

Next Class
• Pintade à la Cévenole (Guinea Hen with Mushrooms and Chestnuts) pages 187-188 {You can substitute Duck breast if you like.}

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Running total: $1,142.78 + $9.49 (quail) + $9.09 (other ingredients) = $1,161.36
($3.10 per serving)

Butter used so far: 9 pounds, 30 tablespoons

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::Whisk Wednesdays::
We're cooking our way through a cooking school curriculum using the Le Cordon Bleu at Home cookbook. The "classes" are based on the Le Cordon Bleu curriculum found online and used as a guideline. Not all the items in the curriculum are in the cookbook, but most are. Where the items are not in the book, we try to find a suitable substitution. Find out more here.