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Mock Quails

A veal dish stuffed with sweetbread, pork or ham, oysters, and spices, then stewed and served with a brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mock Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the veal

  1. Cut the veal into 4-inch square slices, 1/2 inch thick, and flatten with a hatchet.

  2. Dip the slices in beaten egg.

  3. Make a force-meat by mixing sweetbread, pork or ham, oysters, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and lemon peel.

  4. Wet the mixture with oyster liquor and lemon juice, then spread it on the veal slices.

  5. Roll each slice tightly and bind with soft thread.

Stew

  1. Place in a broad saucepan and half cover with broth.

  2. Cover and stew slowly for nearly 1 hour.

Make and bake the balls

  1. Make small balls from the remaining force-meat, adding bread crumbs, and roll in flour.

  2. Bake the balls in the oven until browned.

  3. Five minutes before the meat is done, coat the balls in beaten egg yolk twice.

Finish the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the meat from the pan, clip and gently withdraw the threads.

  2. Strain the gravy, add boiling water, thicken with browned flour, and stir in butter.

  3. When it boils, drop in the quail eggs and simmer for 1 minute before pouring over the meat.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Forms the main body of the dish, wrapped around the force-meat and cooked until tender.
Sweetbread
Adds a soft, tender texture to the force-meat filling.
Egg yolk
Gives the coated balls a glossy, golden browned surface.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth finish to the gravy.
Flour
Browned and stirred into the gravy, it thickens the liquid.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with browned flour. Flour must be stirred smoothly into the hot liquid so its starch separates and swells evenly. Added in clumps or to a cool liquid, it forms lumps and the gravy thickens unevenly.

“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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