If you are a Quail hunter, here is a real easy way to fix a nice lunch or dinner in the field. This recipe can be used with almost any type of bird. Mudded Quail for 2 6 medium size Quail cleaned but not plucked. Salt, Pepper, Sage (Wild sage is even better if you have it) to taste 2 medium size onions pealed and cut into 1/3's. You can substitute will onions if available. Some young cattail stalks can be added if available and you like them. 6 strips bacon or ham if you prefer - Prepare a pit fire about 16 inches deep. When the fire has burned down to only coals, remove about 1/2 of the coals and save. - Mix up sufficient mud to entirely encase each Quail about 3/4 inch thick - In each Quail body cavity, placed 1/3 of an onion & 1 strip of bacon - Add Salt, Pepper & Sage to taste in the Quail body cavity. - Stitch up the body cavity - You can use the thorn & attached fiber of the yucca plant if you have them available in the area you are hunting. Otherwise you can use some small sharp green sticks to seal the body cavity if you don't have any string. - Cover each Quail entirely with about 3/4 of an inch of the mud. - Before you place the Quail in the fire pit, sprinkle about a half inch of dirt on the bottom coals. - Place the Quail in the fire pit about an inch apart and cover with the remaining coals you previously set aside. - Let cook around 3 hours. To eat your Quail, simply crack open the balls of mud and remove the cooked Quail. When you open up the mud balls, all the skin and feathers stick to the dried mud leaving the meat moist and nicely flavored with the onion, bacon and spices.
What is mud? Here in the deep south, we have sand, and swamp muck. While swamp muck might resemble mud to some extent, it smells like the inside of a newly opened septic tank. It would not be advisable to encase anything with it you intend to eat. . actually the recipe and technique was informative..... thanks!
tacmotusn, the type of dirt we have here in AZ works well. In some parts of the state the dirt is more like a clay and that really works great. I can see what you're say though. Didn't take into consideration the type of dirt other states have to deal with.
Partner, we don't hardly have dirt at all here. Sand, sand, and more sand. You can enrich it and grow quite a crop of vegies in it, but it takes lots of work. and if you leave it fallow for 5 years it completely leaches out and you are back to sterile sand, and you have to start over.
We have lots of sand out here but below the sand there is often that clay I mentioned. If you want to grow anything out here, at least in the most of the lower part of the state, it takes a lot of water and a lot of nutrients and even more work.
i've done chickens and fish in georgia clay the same way pulls feathers and scales off the same way... good call...
Actually, this is just an old American Indian cooking method used all across the US. Probably every country has their own variation on this method.
