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Quail Stew

A stew of quail cooked with butter, bread, water, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Quail Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the quails down the back, lengthwise.

  2. Place them in a pan with butter and cook.

  3. Prepare the toasted or fried bread and lay the quails on top.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a little water to the pan juices, thicken it, and pour it over the quails.

  2. Squeeze a little lemon juice over the 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Quail + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 in butter and is served over the bread.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the quail and carries flavour in the pan juices.
Bread
Serves as a crisp base that soaks up the pan juices under the quail.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, butter, bread. 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.

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