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Quails Roasted with Ham

Quails roasted with ham slices, basted in butter and water, baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Quails Roasted with Ham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean and stuff the quails as usual.

  2. Cover the quails with slices of ham or pork and secure with pack thread and a sheet of white paper.

Roast and finish

  1. Baste the quails well with butter and water to prevent burning.

  2. Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 45 minutes if the fire is good.

  3. Remove the paper and meat before serving.

  4. Quickly brown the quails.

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. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Quail + hamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Quails
Form the main meat that is roasted and served.
Slices of ham or pork
Wrap the quails to add savory flavor and help keep the meat moist.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavor and promotes browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Quickly brown the quails.. Browning relies on high surface heat and fat, and the lean meat is already cooked through. Browning too long can dry out the birds, so keep this step brief.

“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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