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Roast Quails

Roast quails stuffed with oysters, wrapped in bacon, served on buttered toast with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

Roast 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 the quail

  1. Draw and wipe the quails inside and out with a damp cloth.

  2. Place a raw oyster in the body of each quail and truss them like a chicken.

  3. Bind a slice of bacon over the breast of each quail.

Roast

  1. Place the quails on a roasting rack with a little hot water underneath.

  2. Cover the quails.

  3. Roast in a lively oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

  4. Baste the quails three times with a mixture of butter and water.

  5. Brush the quails with butter, pepper, and salt.

Serve

  1. Serve on buttered toast, drizzled with gravy from the roaster.

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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Quail + oystertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. 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 hot oven.
Raw oysters
Sit inside the birds, where they steam and add a briny, savoury flavour to the meat.
Bacon
Lays over the breast, adding fat that bastes the lean meat and gives savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and promotes browning on the skin, and is used in the basting mixture.

The step that matters

Baste the quails three times. Basting with butter and water keeps the lean quail meat from drying out and helps the skin brown evenly during roasting.

“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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