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Quails Roasted with Ham

A dish of quails stuffed with ham, buttered and roasted.

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

Prepare

  1. Clean, truss, and stuff the quails.

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

Roast

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

  2. Roast for 45 minutes in a good fire.

  3. Remove the paper and meat before serving, and 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
Provide the main meat, which cooks through during roasting and browns at the end.
Slices of ham or pork
Cover the quails to add savory flavor and keep the surface from drying out.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the quails brown.

The step that matters

Basting with butter and water. Butter and water spread over the birds keep the surface moist and reduce the risk of scorching during the long roast over a strong fire.

“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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