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Roasted Quails

Roasted quails are cooked in an oven, covered with bacon or butter, seasoned with salt and pepper.

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 ↓

Roasted 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. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cover the quail breasts with thin slices of bacon or rub them with butter.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the quails, basting them often with butter.

  2. Cook for 15 to 20 minutes until done.

  3. Serve on a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. 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
Provide the main meat, which cooks through in a short, dry-heat roast.
Thin slices of bacon
Cover the breasts, adding fat and savory flavor while the lean meat roasts.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the surface as it is basted over the birds.

The step that matters

Cook for 15 to 20 minutes until done. Quail is small and lean, so it dries out quickly. Roasting only until cooked through, and basting for moisture, keeps the breast tender.

“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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