Name: Broiled Quails
Ingredients: quails; salad oil; lemon juice; butter; coarse sea salt; black pepper; buttered toast; hot stock

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Draw, wipe, and split the quails down the back.
Marinate them in salad oil and lemon juice for 30 minutes.
Broil the quails on a wire broiler for 10 minutes, turning twice.
Butter the quails, then season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Serve on squares of buttered toast topped with a teaspoon of hot stock.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Quail + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together512 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Quail + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together391 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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