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Fried Quails

Fried quails served with a butter and wine sauce over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fried Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quails

  1. Fry the quails in 2 tablespoons of butter until nicely browned. Season with salt and pepper.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate dish, melt the remaining butter over low heat and stir in the flour until smooth.

  2. Slowly add the water and wine, stirring continuously. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Add the fried quails to the sauce and simmer for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread slices and place one on each serving plate.

  2. Lay the quails on top of the toast and pour the gravy over them.

  3. Serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Quail + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. White wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,433 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quails
Provide the main meat, which browns in butter and becomes tender in the simmered sauce.
Butter
Browns the quails and, melted with flour, forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquids into a smooth gravy.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy, deepening its flavour.
Bread
Toasted slices soak up the gravy and give the dish a crisp base.

The step that matters

Browning the quails in butter. Browning creates flavourful Maillard reactions on the surface. Crowding the pan or cooking at too low a heat will steam the quails instead, leaving them pale and less flavourful.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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