Girl Hunter

by Georgia Pellegrini

  1/2 cup diced shallots

  4 garlic cloves, diced

  1 cup sliced white button mushrooms

  1/2 cup thinly sliced leeks

  1 cup seeded and diced tomatoes

  Salt and pepper

  4 sprigs fresh thyme

  8 tablespoons white wine

  4 whole quail

  Salt and pepper

  2 egg whites, lightly beaten

  1. Preheat the oven to 425°F. If you have a convection setting, that is best.

  2. In a sauté pan, heat 2 tablespoons of the oil. Sweat the shallots and garlic until they are soft. Add the mushrooms and brown them on all sides. Add more oil or a bit of butter toward the end if the pan becomes too dry. Add the leeks and tomatoes. Cover partially with a lid and cook on low heat until all of the excess liquid has evaporated. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Cut two large pieces of parchment paper in half. Fold each piece in half and cut off the corners, rounding off each edge, so that when unfolded, all outer and inner corners of each piece of paper are rounded.

  4. Place a fourth of the vegetable mixture on one rounded half of each piece of parchment. Top each with a whole sprig of thyme and moisten with 2 tablespoons of white wine.

  5. Season the quail liberally with salt and pepper. Insert a toothpick through the legs to keep them together. Then lay one quail over each bed of vegetables.

  6. Using a pastry brush, brush the edges of the parchment paper with the beaten egg white, and press the edges together to seal. Brush the edges of the folded package with the beaten egg white and make a series of short folds along the edges. Brush the edges again with egg white and repeat the short folds. Very lightly brush the top of each parchment package with oil.

  7. Place the papillotes on a sheet tray. Bake for 10 minutes, until completely puffed and the parchment has browned. Serve the quail in the papillote to be opened at the table, so that people can enjoy the aroma when they open the package.

  Also try: any small game bird of similar size

  Quail Kebabs

  Serves 4

  This idea of kebabs was described to me while I was in England, sitting at the fireside with a lovely woman, at a pub. She is married to a farmer-gamekeeper and is frequently faced with a glut of game birds. This is one of her favorite recipes, no doubt inspired by the high-quality ethnic food that is now prevalent in Britain. You can also add any medley of vegetables to these skewers. These kebabs will also work with a variety of other sauces, such as barbecue sauce (page 227) or sweet-and-sour dipping sauce (page 226).

  4 quail, quartered, deboned, and cut into large chunks

  4 tablespoons finely diced green chiles

  4 cloves garlic, minced

  1 tablespoon ground coriander

  2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil

  2 tablespoons lemon juice

  1 tablespoon curry powder

  1 teaspoon red chili powder

  1/2 cup plain yogurt

  1 cup coconut milk

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and marinate for 2 days in the refrigerator.

  2. If using wooden skewers, soak them for 30 minutes first. Then skewer the chunks of meat onto four wooden or metal skewers and barbecue for about 6 minutes, rotating and basting with the marinade once (discard any remaining marinade). Alternatively, you can broil the skewers in the oven, though be careful not to overcook them or they will become dry.

  Also try: brant, coot, duck, gallinule, goose, grouse, prairie chicken, partridge, pheasant, pigeon, ptarmigan, quail, rail, snipe, turkey, squirrel, rabbit

  Stuffed Quail

  Serves 4

  This is an elegant dish, and the stuffing is good enough to eat on its own by the spoonful. I suggest deboning the quail first so that the flavors can be scooped up and swallowed together, rather than your having to pick around the bones. The birds become little packages this way, which can be tied off with a strand of green onion or chive if you’re feeling particularly whimsical. Deboning may sound intimidating, but there are several good online video tutorials that a quick search will pull up for you. Or you can simply get a good pair of kitchen shears and cut along both sides of the backbone and remove the spine, which will allow you to wrap the quail around the stuffing but keep the remaining bones in.

  10 tablespoons butter

  4 tablespoons finely diced shallots

  4 celery stalks, peeled of outer strings and finely diced

  1 cup white wine

  8 tablespoons finely chopped walnuts

  4 tablespoons dried currants

  4 cloves garlic, diced

  4 tablespoons bread crumbs

  8 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-parsley leaves

  2 tablespoons fresh thyme

  8 quail, deboned if possible

  Salt and pepper

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Meanwhile, melt 6 tablespoons of the butter in a small sauté pan and sweat the shallots and celery over low heat, until translucent.

  2. Add the white wine and reduce by half.

  3. In a small bowl, combine the walnuts, currants, garlic, bread crumbs, parsley, and thyme.

  4. Once the wine is reduced by half, stir in the bread crumb mixture and cook until it thickens and forms a paste. Season with salt and pepper to taste and set aside.

  5. Distribute a lump of stuffing onto the back side of the breast meat of each deboned quail and wrap the leg meat and breast meat around it until it is sealed. Fasten with a toothpick through the seam.

  6. Lay the quail in a cast-iron skillet with 4 tablespoons of butter. Place the skillet in the oven and bake for 12 to 15 minutes, basting the top of the quail with butter three times during the process.

  7. Remove from the oven, and remove the toothpicks carefully from each bird. Serve immediately.

  In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy

  A little I can read.

  —SHAKESPEARE

  7

  A Moveable Hunt

  As if to prolong my visit in the land of luxury, a college classmate named Annabelle sends me a note inviting me to go hunting with her family in England over Thanksgiving. She had read in an alumni magazine about my newfound foray into the world of hunting and thought I might want to have the traditional British hunting experience.

  “It is a really special event and I think that you’d love it,” she says.

  And so needing very little convincing, a week after Hill Country I drive through the English countryside toward a different kind of high-class hunt, the kind we model ours after.

  Two hours north of London, 6 miles to the west of Cambridge, is a village called Ellington. Some say it isn’t a village at all but merely a hamlet, with ten brick houses, a church, and a village pub to call its own. The spines of the narrow roads leading here glisten in the fresh evening rain, sodden leaves smack the passing cars, tires spatter through the puddles, and it feels like midnight at five o’clock. I arrive at a row of small brick houses lined up like siblings and glowing behind the spikes of a black iron fence. Where the spikes part to reveal fine gravel, I slow and turn left, and drive into the darkness, between the shadows of great conifers that continue down the row like a suspended reverie.

  Past the small brick houses, at the end of the driveway, is a great red mansion in fading brick. A white door frames the silhouette of a woman. Around her neck is a rope of pearls that match her straight, pearl-colored hair. She says her name is Magdalen, and she speaks in an accent that is part high British, part Danish farmer. “Let’s leave this wet night behind us,” she says, as the mansion swallows us in.

  In the drawing room, a large fire is purring, and pristine tea sandwiches are stacked in a pyramid, made of white bread with trimmed crusts, smoked salmon, and cucumber. There is an almond cake, too, dense and delectable. Magdalen pours milk into the bottom of porcelain teacups, their gilded edges twinkling, then dilutes it with very strong tea, exquisitely hot, that steams and blends with the salty s
almon on our tongues. The room is pink and tufted. Cream and rose stripes of silk shine from the couch; thick curtains fall heavily from the high ceiling to the ground. The high windows are shuttered from the inside, white and wooden, and latch with a fat wooden arm. The fire cracks and spits, and elegant smiling Annabelle and her husband, Anderson, sit intertwined on one couch while Magdalen sits on the edge of another, talking about pheasants—“They say that the pheasant always walks toward the sun.”

  Preceded only by the smell of a pipe, puffing its tobacco like a small chimney, Magdalen’s husband, Fergus, enters the room. He is carrying a glass bowl of ground pork studded with sage, and he is slowly mixing it with a fork as he walks. In the corner, he sits in a small chair, mixing quietly while we talk and sip, his clear, rimless spectacles stationed at the tip of his nose, the smoke from the pipe rising and mixing with his facade.

  When the tea sandwiches and almond cake are finished, we move into the kitchen, where Fergus finishes assembling his pork mixture and peels soft-boiled eggs. He spreads a layer of ground pork on a cutting board, slathers it with Roquefort, then rolls a strip of it around a boiled egg. “You put the ship in the bottle,” he says, demonstrating. He rolls the pork-covered egg in whole wheat flour and sets it on a plate, then repeats with the others, one by one.

  In the next room, the breakfast room, we fill our leather-bound flasks with cherry brandy and sloe gin for the next morning’s hunt, drinks that will keep us warm in the sunless British fields. While we siphon the brandy into the containers, Fergus stirs another bowl of pork and announces in a slow British staccato, “Time to go to the pub.” And so, with the flasks full and the pork mix resting, we wrap ourselves in coats and rubber shoes, and walk out into the black night, among the shadows of the great trees again until we get to the end of the driveway where the wrought-iron spikes line the row of glowing brick houses. We make a left onto silent country blacktop, and a few hundred yards down, across a wooden footbridge, we come to a pub named the White Fox.

  It is lively beyond the creaking door. A small fire burns at the end of a small stucco room that seems to contain the entire population of Ellington. Men stand grinning broadly, their chins raised slightly. They wear wool sweaters and corduroy and leather boots laced above their ankles. An old man with sunken lips talks about cricket, and I am told that he plays it better than anyone ever has before. Eyes twinkle and the laughter reverberates as the room gets warmer and people drink on, save for the bursts of cold air that enter with each new patron. The rule is that villagers buy a pitcher of beer in the order in which they enter the pub, and so pitchers of room-temperature British ales are passed about, and ciders, too, and the room is filled with the movement of fluttering eyelids and blond heads, and a pretty girl floats from side to side behind the sticky, lacquered bar.

  Tom the gamekeeper sits beside the fire drinking a Pink Lady, cider with a dash of port, a drink from the 1930s that is said to have rendered the French worthless when they drank it during wartime. People talk about the next morning’s hunt, whether the fog and wind will behave and whether anyone will catch a woodcock or the mystical, rare white-headed pheasant they call the Christopher Reeves, which once chased Fergus as he drove across the field in his green John Deere Gator. The villagers laugh and tell other stories about one another, because the community is, in truth, an extended family all dwelling side by side in the glowing brick houses of Ellington. And when they are done with their stories and their laughter, and the last pitcher has been emptied of its last drop of foam, people begin to trickle out, and we do, too, walking out under the lanterns laced with cobwebs, where the air smells like fish and chips lingering from the pub kitchen, back over the wooden footbridge, back along the silent country blacktop, to the doorstep of Ellington Estate.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, the muted light leaks through the yellow taffeta curtains of my room, and I can hear a tinkling sound crescendo as Magdalen brings a tray of Earl Grey up the stairs and to the door. She knocks and sets down the tray, snaps on the lightbulb under the fluted lampshade with its ruffled edges, and pours my tea, the milk, as always, first. I sip it until it is gone, and eat a chocolate biscuit laced with orange marmalade, and when I return from the bathroom an invisible butler has already removed the tray.

  Downstairs in the breakfast room are chocolate croissants and grapefruit and a chorus of jams. Soon I can hear the villagers come in the front door and head to the drawing room, where Fergus is already pouring cherry brandy into small crystal cups. The people are as cheery as they were the night before, but now instead of wearing corduroy and wool sweaters, they are wearing tweeds, and knee socks with tassels, and some are wearing rubber Wellingtons and olive-colored newsboy caps, and almost all of the men are wearing ties. One is even wearing a Mexican ammo belt, a ring of golden shot shells clinging to the circumference of his belly.

  The room fills and when everyone has arrived, the chatter subsides and Tom the gamekeeper passes out the peg cards to the eight guns, which assigns their shooting station, and explains the rules and the choreography of the day ahead. Fergus announces a ten-pound bonus to the shooters if they get a white-headed Christopher Reeves pheasant and a five-pound fine if they don’t, and the room lets out a roar of laughter.

  The tradition of this kind of driven shoot in England began with nobility and is rooted in the class system. It is almost always held on estates and is almost always an elaborate affair, if not quite as elaborate today as it once was. It is shooting, more than hunting, and I have even heard it called grocery shopping by my serious Texas hunter friends, because most of the work is done by those not shooting the guns. But if this is grocery shopping, then it is a formal and elegant form of it, one that British of noble descent practiced for centuries at home and in colonies, and a form that has now been adopted in part by the Texans and others in the United States.

  A shoot requires advance planning on the part of the estate. Birds are placed in the fields weeks before the season begins so they can orient themselves to their surroundings and so the gamekeeper can ensure their health. The birds are encouraged to stay in the shooting area through the good animal husbandry of the gamekeeper, who makes sure the habitat and environment is appealing to them.

  On the day of the hunt, the shooters, called guns, are placed in assigned positions with assistants to help load their shotguns. When in position, a team of beaters, led by the gamekeeper, move through the areas of cover, swinging sticks or white flags to drive the game out. These events are called drives, because the birds are driven over a line where the guns wait patiently in their predetermined places, spaced twenty to fifty yards apart, bellies full of cherry brandy and chocolate croissants.

  In the drawing room, we guns now select our violet peg cards, then walk down the stone steps of the estate onto the gravel drive. We walk up the ramp into the back of a horse cart lined with wooden benches on either side, and pile in with our leather gun slings, puffing clouds of brandy-laden breath into the bitter air.

  When we step out onto the first field, the ground is sodden and sucks against my rubber boots. A mythical scene of the English moors unfolds, the colors and the fog painted in beige and cream and gray. In the distance, an old, white-bearded man with a walking stick emerges from the mist, making his way along the bushes with his white flag, keeping a distance from the other beaters so his wobbly legs aren’t lost in the thorns. As he approaches the guns, he looks like a sorcerer emerging from the pages of a book of legends, the tangled wires of his beard swaying as he waves his flag.

  Traditionally, it was less prestigious to be a beater. It was the aristocracy who held the guns while the servants beat the bushes, managed the dogs, and carried the equipment. Today, in most cases, it is still about money; people usually pay several thousand dollars to be a gun in places that make a business out of this kind of hunting. But here at the Ellington shoot, it is more about preference. I am the only woman standing in a line of men, in their caps and tweeds, holding gu
ns in the field. In front of me in the distance are the rest of the men and all of the women and city girls, giggling and chattering through the woods in their pink and olive-colored Wellies.

  The blow of Tom’s high-pitched horn pierces the picture as the first drive begins, and from far off I hear the pitter-pattering of more white flags slapping against the brush, as the beaters push the birds toward a flushing point. Sometimes the birds begin to flock in large numbers; sometimes they are partridge, sometimes pheasant, sometimes wood ducks. Sometimes the birds are smart and scurry ahead along the edge of the woods, rather than take to the sky.

  The drives are twenty-five to fifty minutes long. They begin when Tom blows his horn and the beaters begin beating the bushes, and they end when the beaters reach the end of the wooded area and Tom blows his horn a second time. Each gun fires against the strip of sky in front and behind, and always above the tree line. Depending on the position they occupy and where the birds are breaking, the guns will get many or few birds, and so the guns rotate pegs at each drive to ensure they all get a shot.

  The shots ring out in the misty air, the guns pausing only to reload—ancient, double-barreled over-unders and side-by-sides, some no doubt worth upward of $100,000. It feels a bit as I imagine wars used to be in ancient times; people lining up in an orderly fashion and simply shooting; waiting to see how the chips fall when it is all over. In my case, when it is all over, there is a colorful pheasant at my feet, but not the Christopher Reeves.

  Once the second horn sounds, the dog handlers and their anxious dogs begin the task of retrieving all of the birds that have dropped. The birds are loaded on to the game cart and the beaters reassemble to prepare for the next drive, as the guns walk up the ramp into the horse cart and ride the bumpy ride to their next peg.