Skip to main content
Main

Roast Quail

Roast quail wrapped in salt pork, boiled, then roasted with butter, served with currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quail and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Roast Quail

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Wrap each quail in a slice of fat salt pork and pack them closely in a saucepan.

  2. Season the quail with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.

  3. Pour boiling water over the quail until just covered.

  4. Cover the saucepan.

  5. Place it over a hot fire for 5 to 10 minutes.

  6. Remove the quail and discard the pork.

  7. Wipe the birds with a clean towel.

Roast and serve

  1. Rub the quail all over with butter.

  2. Roast them until brown in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C), basting twice with more butter and the drippings.

  3. Strain the gravy from the saucepan.

  4. Melt the gravy with an equal quantity of currant jelly for sauce.

  5. Serve the quail hot as soon as they are brown.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Quail
Provides the lean meat that is cooked and served as the main dish.
Fat salt pork
Wraps the birds and bastes them with melting fat, keeping the lean meat moist.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, helping the skin brown and turn golden in the oven.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness to the gravy, balancing its savory richness in the sauce.

The step that matters

Roasting until brown. Quail is small and lean, so it dries quickly. Roasting only until browned in a hot oven, with regular basting, keeps the meat juicy while the skin colours through the Maillard reaction.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, pork, pepper, butter, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, pork, pepper, butter, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes