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 ↓
Boiled Quail
Ingredients
Directions
Split the quail in the back.
Broil the quail over a bright fire.
Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and butter.
Cook slowly to avoid scorching the surface before the inside is warmed through.
Serve on hot dishes.
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.
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Quail + buttertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together512 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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Quail + peppertop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together391 recipes
Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
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Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
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