For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  In the long run, sleep endures better than food and food better than sex, a matter of wearying innards. It is with a certain nostalgia that I remember a time almost twenty years ago when I could demoralize a leg of lamb by myself; now I gnaw the meat off a shank and call it a night. This waning of my carnal appetites, however, has not diminished my enthusiasm for quality, and for that reason my favorite person to cook for is me. With no criticism, pressure, advice, queries, or demands leveled against me, I am for a few precious moments master of my destiny. I choose the ingredients, the method, the timing, the accompaniments, the presentation, and when and where to savor my creation. When what I cook is not to my satisfaction, I throw it across the room without raising anyone’s eyebrow; when it’s good, I boast of my exploits and the dogs nod their approval.

  These days, if I squeeze the trigger I squeeze it at something that flies, and if I hit it, I eat it. I keep, for that reason, a spaniel at heel (or thereabouts) to deliver the bird, whose funeral I wish to celebrate in my stomach, not in that of a raccoon. In the case of quail, eating one is a delight that, coupled with the right hanging time, is like kissing a young girl, a soft-skinned beauty not altogether attuned to the practical matters of hygiene, but lovely all the same. Lolita at daybreak comes to mind.

  Five dressed bobwhite quail weigh about a pound. I know a Cajun who regularly eats that many, fried, in one sitting, but he is un peu touché, as they say over there. I have had a few deep-fried quail that melted in my mouth, but what I remember most about the others is the grease on my shirt and an intense desire to brush my teeth. In the same vein, the charm of eating barbecued quail, usually bacon-wrapped, in the fields during a break in the shooting action is somewhat diminished when what appears on the platter looks like a cluster of frogs fished out of an incinerator. The habit of wrapping bacon around quail is fine if one likes bacon, because that is what the bird will taste like: smoked pig. Salt pork or fatback, blanched to lessen the salt content, makes for a neutral substitute. Most of the time, quail and doves that should be delicious lie on the plate like an insult. Subtlety isn’t the driving force behind Southern cooking.

  Now that I have insulted all those in need of insults—as well as others who aren’t—I will offer some alternatives to criticism.

  The subtleties and individuality of a bobwhite quail depend on what the bird is stuffed with and what it sits on. Beginning with the latter, the birds can sit on a julienne of vegetables, an apple round (baked longer than the ten to twelve minutes required for the birds), a puree of just about anything from chestnuts to garlic mashed potatoes, thin corn crepes or fried squares of polenta, grits, etc. The flavors should be delicate; therefore forget smoked sausages, Mexican bean dip, and Gouda cheese, as that is what you will taste. A gracious Southern lady stuffs her quail with oysters; a French one with ratatouille. I like to parboil sweetbreads, pull them into chunks half the size of my thumb, powder them with flour, and sauté them at very high heat for thirty seconds before pushing them into the bird’s stomach. Sometimes, when making crepes from corn, a vegetable that marries well with bobwhites, I undercook some of the batter in the same buttered skillet I browned the birds in and stuff the corn mush into the birds before sending them to the oven. A duxelles of mushrooms (a good one made with morels or cèpes is advised) is at home both inside the bird or on a square of fried toast. Last winter I added fresh lump-meat crab to the duxelles and licked my chops.

  I have roasted quail with everything from shallots to pitted grapes, cherries, calf brains, white boudin, browned apple slices—but always elements that are neutral enough to allow the subtle flavor of the bird to prevail. For those who like rice, fill a quail with risotto; for those who like sweet things, spoon in some yams; for those who enjoy expensive experiments, shove a black truffle up its ass. My favorite quail mattress is one made with foie gras; my favorite baste, the dewy sweat of a pom-pom-twirling cheerleader.

  A classic French stuffing for game birds (say eight quail) is made with half a pound of washed chicken livers (duck is better if you can get them), one-quarter pound of somewhat fatty pork, two cloves of garlic, two shallots, a spoonful of cognac (Madeira or port will work), a pinch of fresh thyme, a handful of dry bread crumbs, a spoonful of flour, salt, pepper, two eggs, and the heart, liver, and gizzards of the birds. Transfer the ingredients into a blender and let her rip for a minute. The stuffing should be thick and moist. Needless to say, more or less ingredients can be added: paprika, leeks, dog tongues, etc.

  Last time I was in France, I asked Richard Labbé, a twenty-six-year-old chef with twelve years of schooling and salaried experience already behind him, to make something so delicious and complicated no one in America would ever try to duplicate it; the bobwhites were domesticated, the meal was not.

  Eight quail were partially deboned from the inside, leaving the legs intact, by first removing the wishbone between the chest and the neck and then, using a small knife, working the blade between the bird’s ribs and skin upward to the keel. Using his fingers, Labbé patiently pulled and cut the meat away from the tiny bones until the entire rib cage lay on the kitchen table and the birds lay deflated, see despondent. Labbé cut two large truffles into thin slices and slipped as many as he could fit between the quail’s breast meat and skin. He filled the boned cavity with the classic stuffing, using instead of pork, which he too feels imparts an unhealthy flavor to the delicate nature of the dish, the meat of two additional quail. But as he said, he could just as well have used a little thigh meat from a chicken or duck, or even a peeled apple. Finally he inserted an additional finger of fresh foie gras in the middle of the stuffing and sealed the cavity by trussing the birds with kitchen string.

  The quail were browned in clarified butter, removed from the cast-iron pot, and replaced with chopped onions, carrots, a sprig of thyme, and a small laurel leaf. He simmered the mirepoix until the vegetables were soft, reinstated the birds, flamed them with two shots of cognac, and moved the cocotte, uncovered, to the middle of the oven (350 degrees) for ten minutes. While the birds were cooking he reduced two cups of veal stock down to one and added salt, pepper, and a spoonful of flour dissolved in white wine to bind the stock. When the ten minutes were up, he added the reduced veal stock to the quail until the birds were bathing in sauce, covered the pot, and put it back into the oven for ten minutes more. During the cooking of the quail he decrusted eight pieces of white bread and fried them in clarified butter until they turned color. Lastly he removed the lid, basted the birds with the cooking liquid, and roasted them for five more minutes.

  Labbé tested the birds by inserting a cooking needle into a quail breast and touching it to his tongue. Satisfied that the temperature of the needle was as it should be, he moved the birds to a platter, covered them with foil, and rested them on the opened oven door while he reduced the sauce, strained and threw out the vegetables, added more truffles, topped the pieces of toast with a slice of foie gras, and, moments before serving the dish, whisked off-heat a tablespoon of butter into the saucepan. He explained that the birds could wait, covered, on the apron of the oven for up to twenty minutes, but that one should never bring the sauce back to a boil once the butter had been added. He said that cooking, like painting, requires layers of thought and ingredients, a search for the right colors, textures, and affirmation. Good cooking, particularly of foods that involve intricate flavors, equals lots of dishes to wash.

  The quail were presented sitting on their individual foie gras toasts next to a mountain of French string beans and an excess of thinner french fries, all under the supporting presence of a magnum of Château Canon 1975.

  VII

  The future of both public and private bobwhite quail hunting will one day flow out of aviaries. There isn’t much public land left in the South and where there is, there aren’t enough funds to raise and manage the numbers of wild birds needed to satisfy the thousands of hunters who have nowhere else to hunt. Take it from someone who checks out every deal, reads the daily
ads in the local mullet wrapper (newspaper), compares prices on secondhand machinery, and buys the cheapest fertilizer and last year’s seeds: raising wild quail in this final decade of the twentieth century is very expensive. The slightest hiccup in weather, an unscheduled predator fly-in, a pack of wild dogs, or a handful of tabby cats will upset a bobwhite population whose success as a species is dubious to begin with. At best, one hundred eggs will produce fifty chicks, of which twelve will see fall and seven live to breed. Raising wild quail with a less-than-full wallet is not viable in terms of effort versus returns. Even if I manage my eight-hundred-acre farm correctly, the weather is favorable, and I raise thirty coveys a year, all it would take to wipe out that population (or at least push it over the neighbor’s fence) is a friend who can shoot, half a dozen good bird dogs, a death wish, and two weeks’ time. Last season the total bag for the farm was sixty-one bobwhites, fewer than the brothers and I shot in one day.

  Simply put, the acreage and management required to build enough coveys to hunt two or three times a week for three and a half months is available only to the wealthiest of hunters. The future of those others who want to work dogs and shoot bobwhites rests in releasing pen-raised birds on small tracts of land, or sinking into the trough of low-rent commercial bird farms—the put-out-in-the-morning, kill-before—lunch, pay-and-move-on slaughterhouses.

  For me to criticize this inevitable trend would be presumptuous and insulting, so I won’t, except to suggest that these birds are merely living targets, released in the wild for the sole reason of being shot, and have nothing to do with the intrinsic act of hunting. However, just because I would rather suck my thumb than shoot pen-raised birds doesn’t mean that others less fortunate than I shouldn’t take advantage of what is left of an old tradition.

  The practice of releasing bobwhites (chickens: thousands on some plantations) on the ground before the beginning of the hunting season makes for a better flying bird but is considerably more expensive than releasing fewer quail, or even the exact number requested moments before the shooting party takes to the woods. Some of the better pen-raised birds I know are released in early September for a mid-October to mid-March cull. Gillionville Plantation, outside of Albany, Georgia, offers, on its eight thousand acres, hunting from horseback and mule-drawn wagons, lodging in an exquisite antebellum house, and a quality of food and service the most persnickety of sportsmen could wish for. The owner expects that 40 percent of the eight thousand quail (one per acre) put out in August will die in the first two weeks after their release, 20 percent of the remaining stock before the season opens. The birds that survive to sing Christmas carols fly well, well enough to fool most modern hunters into thinking they are shooting wild birds. An assumption to be cherished until the dazzling day they are introduced to the real thing.

  The worst-case scenario is the game factory that puts out the quail while the shooter is readying his accoutrement. Birds that once pointed usually have to be booted into flight by the shooter or dog handler; birds that wobble into the first thicket have been known to die of a heart attack on the re-flush. The common denominator in all quail management is money. An afternoon of shooting wobblers on a specific fifty-acre allotment of land, with B. J. Pruit and friends, on a preserve that kills between eighty and one hundred thousand quail a year (!), or a week of living the antebellum life, while not as expensive as raising wild birds, will nevertheless stretch a man’s pocketbook.

  The good news is that there are a handful of bird farms in the South that have had the foresight to raise quail in large aviaries. One man raises his birds in a gutted motel with minimal human contact and trained dogs that romp through the bedrooms once a day to acquaint the birds with predation and the usefulness of their wings. These quail are released in the wild at night, in small numbers, next to food and cover. Their survival rate is considerably higher, as is their value as targets, and a small percentage live to mate in the wild.

  To those quail hunters who will in the years to come forgo the wilderness experience for a tamer venue and the companionship of their peers, bobwhites, like pheasants, are the answer. Pen-raised birds lend themselves well to the sham of not-so-highly-strung bird dogs, older horses, mules with domino-size teeth, German guns, young whiskey, fast food, and good-natured lies. The only thing really missing from the older scenario is the bird itself: the wild Colinus virginianus, the miniature icon of the American game bird, a little bird with a long history. However, like all shades of ignorance, the real thing won’t be missed by those who don’t know any better. Hunters will momentarily enter a setting totally foreign to their daily lives, a setting that will remind them of their childhood or a book they read, and be absolutely blissful at the opportunity to draw a bead on a small brown bird with abnormally long shinbones. Better yet they will actually kill some, unaware that, like the men who hunt them, the birds fly at a leisurely pace.

  One of the most important factors in deciding whether to raise wild or pen-raised bobwhites (or any kind of game bird) is how to deal with predation. Does one go to war against raccoons, skunks, possums, dogs, cats, et al., or does one flow with the natural process, knowing that the added numbers of quail are going to attract an added number of predators?

  What is not voiced aloud but is known by everyone in the business is that the most damaging predation to bob-white quail—70 percent—is avian in nature, specifically from the accipiter hawks. At the Tall Timber Research Station the highest quail count goes back to 1973, a year when the hawks were absent, a DDT kind of year. Federally protected, secretive, and quick, the blue darters, as they are called down here, are powered by short, broad wings to better elude the branches of the trees they hunt under. I catch shadowy glimpses of them during their northern migration about the same time the robins show up—which unfortunately for my quail is soon after burning—and again in the fall when the leaves are falling, the cover is stunted, and the understory revealed.

  The increase in mammalian predators has been caused in part by the economic and social pressures on trapping. Foxes, raccoons, and the rest of the fur-bearing mammals have exploded back into hungry numbers.

  A hundred years ago or even less, the best quail-hunting grounds were found next to small—one- or two-acre—quilts of diversified crops planted by tenants and small farmers. Those tenants ate the opossums, trapped the raccoons and foxes for money, and shot the chicken hawks. The worst-kept secret in quail management these days is that most local plantations and private shooting grounds habitually break the federal laws that protect the birds of prey, and quite honestly they have the most quail. The problem with all this killing for the benefit of one species over another is that it doesn’t make moral sense; when it applies to humans it is considered an abomination. Our continuous meddling has imposed on nature the attitude of a plane whose wings have stalled and entered a spin. Pilots are taught that when everything fails, release the controls and the plane will right itself; it will right itself because it is designed to right itself, and inherently wants to do so. So does nature. This year, the accipiters ate me out of house and home in terms of quail. To a hawk I am a cheap supplier of fine foods. This year the Cooper’s hawks came and went with the robins, and I would not trade either for a quail.

  VIII

  The toughest ticket in town is an invitation to shoot bobwhite quail on a private plantation. Exemptions include the local doctors, politicians, and lawyers, all of whom have historically profited from being needed commodities.

  As a rule, though, bobwhite quail, ducks, and wild turkey are the sole property of the plantation owners who, to fend off unmitigated loneliness—not to mention boredom—invite out-of-town friends to hunt the birds that were so assiduously tended to for nine long months. The end of a week of shooting finds one group of tweed-clad sportsmen nudged out the door in favor of a fresh set of faces, en route on Victor airways, from colder regions and countries. Friends and friends of friends crisscross each other in the sky, mansions overflow with friendly pink f
aces, domestics put in double-time to make up for the dog days of summer, and the evenings brim with synergetic, political, and artistic babble, crossword puzzles and parlor games with nary a difference of opinion. Guests are expected to be entertaining, if not via their fowling abilities, certainly through the correctness of their politics, social graces, business acumen, and general good-fellowship. For example, talking through one’s teeth is recognized, braying is not; Yale is desirable, Harvard too liberal; Reagan equals God, Clinton caca; so forth and so on.

  When I first moved to Tallahassee I was invited to hunt in a setting that elevated the word beautiful to heights I had never dreamed existed. There is, in everyone’s mind’s eye, a vision of perfection; for me it was northern Florida, early in December, before the golden landscape had buried itself. I hunted on rolling land that never ended, across fawn-colored fields anchored to expanses of red clay that reminded me of Africa, next to ponds and lakes onto which thousands of waterfowl showered daily, and under the shadowy limbs of huge trees that conjured the complicated words and feelings of the South. It was a game paradise, the likes of which I had not experienced since Sehoy Plantation in Union Springs, Alabama, twenty years before. Everything was mysterious and new and the dogs ran collarless and big across the broom sedge. The points were called by either a tall black man who went under the name of Two Man or his flanker, Lonnie, whose mare could outrun a deer. Lonnie would stand his ground, careful not to spook the pointed covey, and raise his hat high above his head for Two Man to see. I remember riding up at a full gallop, dismounting on the fly, walking with a beating heart beyond where the dogs made their stand, and shooting into the rising birds as if it were the most important thing in my life.