Skip to main content
Main

Quail on Toast

Quail on Toast is a dish of fried quail served on toasted bread with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Quail on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the quail

  1. Fry the quails in 1 tablespoon of butter until nicely browned.

  2. Season the fried quails with salt and pepper.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the remaining butter over low heat.

  2. Stir in the flour until dissolved.

  3. Slowly add the water and wine, stirring continuously.

  4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper.

  5. Add the fried quails to the sauce.

  6. Simmer for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread slices, one for each quail.

  2. Serve the quails on the toasted bread, pouring the gravy over the top.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Quail + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together512 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 during the long simmer.
Butter
Browns the quail and enriches the sauce with fat and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the wine and water mixture into a gravy as it cooks.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the quail. Frying the quail until nicely browned builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale quail will give a flat-tasting gravy after the long simmer.

“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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes