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Broiled Quail

A quail roasted in a skillet with butter, salt, pepper, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and butter work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Broiled Quail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Dress the quail and split it down the back.

  2. Heat a skillet over medium‑high heat and oil it with a little fat.

  3. Place the quail in the skillet and cover with a flat tin, pressing down with a weight.

  4. When the quail begins to brown, place a lump of butter on each quail and turn them often.

Finish and season

  1. Once the quails are nicely browned, add 1 cup of hot water and cook slowly until tender.

  2. Season well with salt and pepper.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Quail + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Quail
Is the main protein; splitting it flat and pressing helps it cook evenly and brown.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor and helps the surface brown as it melts over the quail.
Hot water
Creates steam in the covered pan so the quail cooks through and becomes tender.

The step that matters

Pressing the quail under a weight while it browns. Pressing keeps the split bird in contact with the hot pan, so the skin browns evenly. Uneven contact leaves pale patches and uneven cooking.

“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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