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Quail Pie

A savory pie filled with quails, salt pork, hard‑boiled eggs, butter, pepper, parsley, lemon juice, and flour, baked in pie‑paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Quail Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, truss, and stuff the quails, then parboil for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Line the sides of a deep pan with rich pie-paste.

Assemble

  1. Place a couple of slices of salt pork or bacon in the bottom.

  2. Add slices of hard-boiled eggs, butter, and pepper.

  3. Place the quails in the pan, sprinkle with minced parsley, and add lemon juice.

  4. Dot bits of butter rolled in flour over the birds, then layer with more egg slices and bits of pork.

  5. Pour in the water used for parboiling, and cover with pie-paste, leaving an opening in the center.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Quails
Provide the main meat, which cooks through in the pie with the surrounding filling.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and richness to the filling as slices layered between the birds.
Salt pork or bacon
Adds savory fat and salty flavor that seasons the birds and filling as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling as it melts over the birds.
Flour
Thickens the butter and juices in the pan, helping form a cohesive sauce.
Pie-paste
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and holds in the cooking juices.

The step that matters

Leaving an opening in the crust. The opening in the center lets steam escape during baking. Without it, pressure builds under the crust and can distort or split the pastry.

“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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