Tender quail, stuffed with earthy truffles and rich foie gras, baked in flaky puff pastry, surrounded by fresh figs, served with rare Burgundy wine . . . “cailles en sarcophage” might just be the most voluptuously indulgent dish ever concocted.

By the time it appears as the main course in the 1987 Danish movie Babette’s Feast — still the most glorious food film ever made — the once-dour diners are flushed with pleasure (and not a little wine), despite their best intentions not to succumb to the sins of sensual luxury.

Little wonder then that the movie and its star dish have gone on to inspire countless chefs and gourmands including J-C (Jean-Christophe) Poirier, chef-owner of the multiple-award-winning St. Lawrence restaurant.

“For a cook like myself, trained in French classics, it gave me goosebumps,” says Poirier, who is likely the only chef in Vancouver daring enough to serve this complex dish, whose name translates to “quails in coffins.” (It’s offered occasionally as a special at St. Lawrence, and only when he can get his hands on all the ingredients.)

“Nobody really cooks like that any more. And that’s what gets me excited. Rather than inventing something totally new, I like to take something with a little bit of soul, and make it my own.”

What makes dishes like this so memorable, he says, is that they create lingering emotions.

“Like that movie Ratatouille, when he (critic Anton Ego) had the bite of the ratatouille and remembered his mother,” Poirier says. “That’s what makes a dish great. Not just good, but great.”

And, he adds, “At St. Lawrence, it happens every night that someone has that reaction.”

That is exactly what the film, based on a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), captures so deliciously: the transformative joy of gathering around a table to share food and companionship.

In it, Babette is a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 who finds shelter in a strict religious community in rural Denmark, where the pious spinster daughters of the town’s late patriarch take her in as housemaid and cook. Some 14 years later, Babette learns that she has won 10,000 francs in a lottery and decides to cook a “real French dinner” for the town’s few, and increasingly querulous, residents.

What follows is a remarkable seven-course feast that overcomes the unhappy villagers’ resentments, regrets and suspicions of earthly pleasure.

The film, directed by Gabriel Axel, went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Now it’s being remade by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne (Sideways, Downsizing), who plans to set his version in small-town Minnesota. No word yet, though, on whether he will recreate the movie’s most famous dish, the cailles en sarcophage.

The origins of the dish are uncertain — Dinesen herself may have dreamed it up, for all we know — but it has since joined the pantheon of legendary French foods.

“I never heard of it before I watched the movie, so I can’t say where it was from, but I would say the Perigord because truffle is involved, and foie gras, and Cognac,” Poirier says.

He was impressed not just by the dish itself, but by the way Babette — who, it is revealed, was once the greatest chef in Paris — produces it. Not only does she have all the precious ingredients shipped to a remote village in Jutland, she cooks them in less-than-ideal conditions.

“That part of the dinner is very exciting and moving because she’s cooking over fire and without proper equipment,” Poirier says.

“After seeing the movie, I wanted to do it my own way, and within the logistics of serving 100 people a night.”

That meant, for instance, finding the right quail, which Poirier eventually tracked down at Thiessen Specialty Poultry in Mount Lehman.

“It’s a jumbo quail, bigger than what you’d find at the grocery store,” he says.

In the film, Babette tucks “a big slab of foie gras and a layer of truffle” into each deboned quail, but that would be much too costly, so Poirier instead makes a stuffing of foie gras and sausage.

And where Babette serves it with figs, he uses grapes.

“The first time I had quail was in a classic restaurant where it was paired with grapes and honey,” Poirier says nostalgically.

It’s a dish that can take several hours, even days to prepare, so he suggests some shortcuts for home cooks. Rather than making puff pastry and foie gras terrine from scratch, you can purchase good-quality pre-made versions instead. He also suggests preparing it in stages, for instance, by starting the pastry cases the day before.

“The thing with these dishes is it’s a lot of preparation, and then it’s just assembly,” Poirier says.

“You can break it down over two days, three days, just little jobs. And when it comes to the day of, it’s pretty simple.”

He adds: “It’s a very festive dish and decadent as well. It takes a lot of time to prepare, but it’s worth it.”

It’s just the sort of classic haute cuisine Poirier learned cooking with Normand Laprise at Montreal’s celebrated Toqué! and Rob Feenie at Vancouver’s Lumière, and celebrated last year at a collaborative dinner with Canada’s original Top Chef, Dale MacKay, that paid homage to France’s greatest chefs.

It included: Paul Bocuse’s famous truffle soup with its puff pastry dome; Marie-Antoine Carême’s eggs Rossini (poached eggs with foie gras and truffle sauce on brioche); the rich, creamy baked lobster thermidor created by Auguste Escoffier; and a syrup-soaked savarin, named for the legendary food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

“It was pretty good,” Poirier says with a laugh.

Of course, these are not everyday dishes, but rare and special indulgences — just like Babette’s Feast, which could never be truly recreated.

Babette spends every last centime of her 10,000-franc winnings to create that one meal for those 12 people. When the sisters learn this, one of them says, tearfully, “Now you will be poor the rest of your life,” to which Babette replies, “An artist is never poor.”

And neither is any person who gathers friends, family and even the occasional stranger around the table, to share food and wine and each other’s company.

“I think it’s important, as that movie showed, to sit around the table and take your time, even if it’s just once a week,” Poirier says. “It brings people together and that’s the power of food.”

The Babette’s Feast menu

In the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast the seven-course menu consisted of:

• Potage à la Tortue (turtle soup), served with Amontillado sherry

• Blini Demidoff au Caviar (buckwheat pancakes with caviar and sour cream), served with Veuve Cliquot Champagne

• Cailles en Sarcophage (quail stuffed with foie gras and truffles and baked in puff pastry), served with Clos de Vougeot Pinot Noir from Burgundy

• Endive salad

• Savarin au Rhum avec des Figues et Fruit Glacée (rum-soaked sponge cake with figs and candied cherries), served with more Champagne

• Cheese and fruit with Sauternes

• Coffee with Cognac

Recipe: Cailles en Sarcophage (Stuffed Quails in Puff Pastry)

Recipe by chef J-C Poirier of Vancouver’s St. Lawrence restaurant. This will take at least four hours to prepare; ideally, you should start the recipe the day before so you can refrigerate the pastry overnight and prevent it from shrinking during baking. Serve with Pinot Noir, preferably from Burgundy.

Pastry:

1 lb (454 g) store-bought all-butter puff pastry, thawed

1 egg yolk

1 tsp (5 mL) water

Brine:

4 cups (1 L) water

¼ cup (60 mL) kosher salt

1 Tbsp (15 mL) brown sugar

1 bay leaf

2 sprigs thyme

Quails:

6 jumbo quails, deboned (you can find quail at fine butchers, who will also debone it for you on request, although you will have to special order it ahead of time.)

4 Tbsp (60 mL) butter, divided

2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped

2 Tbsp (30 mL) cognac or brandy

1 cup (250 mL) white wine

4 cups (1L) good quality chicken stock (if using a powder base, add 6 sheets of gelatin that have been soaked in cold water to give sticky texture to sauce that can only be achieved with broth derived from bones)

1 Tbsp (15 mL) honey

Salt and pepper, to taste

1 Tbsp (15 mL) cornstarch (optional)

2 Tbsp (30 mL) water (optional)

¼ lb (115 g) foie gras terrine or torchon (such as Rougié from Quebec)

½ lb (230 g) mild pork sausage, casings removed

36 seedless green grapes (peeled if you have the patience)

Mustard greens or arugula, to garnish

Prepare the puff pastry cases:Roll the puff pastry to a thickness of 4 to 5 mm (a little less than 1/4 inch). Using a round (and preferably fluted) pastry cutter of 10 cm (4 inch) diameter, cut the pastry into 12 discs. Slightly twist the cutter on a floured worktop to make sure the disc is cut in a perfectly neat shape. The pastry disc should detach easily from the puff pastry sheet.

Arrange six of the pastry discs on a Silpat baking mat placed on top of a baking sheet. Beat the egg yolk with the water to make an egg wash, then, using a pastry brush, glaze the discs with the egg wash.

Place the other six pastry discs on a floured worktop and cut a hole in the centre of each with a smaller pastry cutter, preferably with a diameter of 6 cm (2.5 inches). You should now have six pastry rings.

Carefully arrange the rings on top of the pastry discs. Glaze with the egg wash and store in the fridge for at least two hours and preferably overnight before baking.

Preheat oven to 400 F (200 C).

Remove pastry from the fridge and apply another brush of egg wash. Place small ring moulds (height 5 or 6 cm, or about 2.5 inches) in the four corners of the baking sheet and place a second baking sheet on top of the moulds. This will help control the rise of the puff pastry shells while baking.

Bake at 400 F (200 C)for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 F (175 C) and cook for another 15 minutes. Remove the top baking sheet and bake for a further 10 minutes.

Make sure the base of the pastry shells is well cooked, then remove from the oven and leave to cool on a rack. Reserve until ready to use.

Prepare the quails and sauce:Make the brine: In a small sauce pot on high heat, bring to a boil 1 cup (250 mL) of the water along with the salt, brown sugar and herbs. Mix in the remaining 3 cups (750 mL) water, transfer to a deep bowl and cool in the refrigerator. Once the brine is chilled, add the deboned quails, making sure they are completely submerged in the liquid. Macerate for 1 hour.

During that time, start making the sauce. In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, melt 2 Tbsp (30 mL) of the butter and sweat the shallots for 3 minutes until soft and cooked.

Deglaze the pan with the cognac and flambé the alcohol, being careful to keep it away from anything that could ignite. Add the white wine and continue cooking until liquid is reduced to ¼ cup (60 mL). Add chicken stock and continue cooking until you have 2 cups (500 mL) of sauce.

Stir in the honey and season with a good pinch of salt and freshly cracked pepper. If at this point your sauce is too thin for your liking, mix the 2 Tbsp (30 mL) cornstarch with the 2 Tbsp (30 mL) water. Bring sauce back to a simmer and whisk in the cornstarch slurry a little at the time until you achieve your desired consistency.

Set sauce aside until ready to serve.

Preheat oven to 425 F (220 C). Remove quails from brine and pat dry.

Cut the foie gras terrine into 6 equal portions; also divide the sausage meat into 6 equal portions. Wrap the sausage around the foie gras to form a ball, then gently stuff each ball inside each quail.

Re-shape the quails into their original form as much as possible. Transfer them to a baking tray lined with Silpat or parchment paper. Gently truss the quails with butcher twine, making one loop starting from the back to the front of the bird, and tie a knot. This will help the birds hold their shapes during cooking.

Season with a little bit of salt and pepper and place in oven. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the size of the quails. The internal temperature should be 135 F (57 C).

Remove the from the oven and let rest for 10 minutes; and keep warm.

In a sauté pan over medium high heat, melt the remaining 2 Tbsp (30 mL) butter and add the grapes. Lower the heat and cook gently for 4 to 5 minutes until warm all the way through. Add the sauce to the grapes and keep warm.

Put the puff pastry cases back in the oven for 2 minutes, then take them out and put them on serving plates. Remove butcher twine from the quails and transfer each one into its dedicated sarcophage (puff pastry case). Spoon sauce around the quails, along with 6 grapes per portion, and garnish with a few leaves of mustard greens or arugula.

Serves 6

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