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Roast Quails

Roast Quails stuffed with raw oysters, wrapped in bacon, baked with butter, pepper, and sea salt, served on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Roast Quails

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. Draw and wipe the quails carefully inside and out with a soft, damp cloth.

  2. Place a whole raw oyster in the body of each quail and truss them like a chicken.

  3. Bind thin slices of fat bacon over the breast of each quail.

Roast

  1. Lay the quails on the grating of your roaster and add a little hot water underneath.

  2. Cook the quails covered in a lively oven at 400°F (200°C) for twenty minutes, basting three times with butter and water.

  3. Wash the quails well with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the quails on squares of buttered toast, moistened with gravy from the roaster.

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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Quail + oystertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. 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

Quails
Form the main dish; their lean meat cooks quickly and needs basting to stay moist.
Whole raw oysters
Placed inside the birds, they add a briny, savoury flavour as the quail roasts.
Thin slices of fat bacon
Bound over the breast, the fat melts and bastes the lean meat, adding moisture and browning.
Butter
Used for basting and washing, it adds fat, richness and golden browning to the skin.
Buttered toast
Serves as a base that soaks up the pan juices and gravy.

The step that matters

Basting during the roast. Quail is very lean and dries out quickly in a hot oven. Regular basting with butter and water keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly, so the birds should be basted at each point called for rather than left unattended.

“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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