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Roast Quail or Prairie Chicken

A roasted quail or prairie chicken seasoned with salt pork, butter, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Quail or Prairie Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress and wipe the birds dry.

  2. Tie a piece of salt pork over the breast of each bird.

Steam and roast

  1. Place the birds in a steamer over boiling water, cover closely, and steam for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the pork and place the birds in the oven.

  3. Baste often with butter and brown the birds.

Serve

  1. Serve with bread crumbs sprinkled on top.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

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

Quail or prairie chicken
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that is steamed and then browned.
Salt pork
Tied over the breast, it bastes the lean meat with fat as it cooks.
Butter
Used for basting, it adds fat that promotes browning and a rich flavor on the skin.
Bread crumbs
Sprinkled on top at serving, they add a light crumbly texture to the birds.

The step that matters

Steam closely covered before roasting. Steaming the birds tenderizes the lean meat before dry oven heat is applied. Keeping the lid closed traps the steam, so the birds cook through gently without drying out.

“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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