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Potted Quail

A preserved dish of quail, veal, bacon, and spices baked in a crust and finished with clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Potted Quail

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the meat

  1. Bone the quail carefully and cut each in half.

  2. Chop the veal and bacon together into sausage meat.

  3. Season the meat with mace, cloves, white pepper, salt, and lemon rind.

Layer the jar

  1. Select a jar and spread a thin layer of the forcemeat on the bottom.

  2. Layer the quail halves in the jar, spreading a little forcemeat between layers.

  3. Top with forcemeat and cover with slices of bacon.

  4. Seal with a crust of flour and water paste.

Bake and press

  1. Bake in a water bath at 300°F (150°C) for 3 hours.

  2. Remove the crust, drain fat and gravy, and press the meat with a plate and weight.

  3. Once cold, cover with clarified butter and seal tightly.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Quail
Forms the main body of the dish, giving the meat its substance and flavor.
Veal
Adds body and a fine, soft texture to the forcemeat as it cooks.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture, keeping the meat tender during the long, gentle bake.
Clarified butter
Covers the top to seal the potted meat from air, helping it keep.

The step that matters

Pressing the meat after baking. Pressing while the meat is still warm packs the layers together and forces out excess fat and gravy, so the finished pot sets dense and sliceable rather than loose and crumbly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, veal, mace, clove, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, veal, mace, clove, lemon, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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