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Roast Quail

Roast Quail is a dish of quail seasoned with salt, pepper, and flour, wrapped in bread salt pork, baked and served with Brown Sweetbread Sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Quail

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Dust each quail with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and flour.

  3. Place each quail on a slice of bread in a roasting pan.

  4. Cover each quail with a thin slice of salt pork.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast in the oven for about 20 minutes.

  2. Garnish with toast points and serve with Brown Sweetbread Sauce.

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. Quail + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  4. Pepper + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Quail
Forms the main protein, cooking through in a short, dry-heat roast.
Salt pork
Its thin slices baste the birds with fat as they roast, keeping the meat moist.
Flour
Dusted on the birds, it helps the skin brown and the surface develop color.
Slices of bread
Set under each bird to catch drippings and soak up fat in the pan.

The step that matters

Covering each quail with salt pork. The thin fatty slice must sit flat over the breast so it melts and bastes the lean meat; gaps leave the breast exposed and prone to drying out in the oven.

“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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