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Roast Quail

Roast Quail is a dish of quails baked with butter, water, and pork fat, served with watercress garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the quails and place a piece of fat pork over the breast of each.

  2. In a baking pan, combine the quails with butter and boiling water.

Roast

  1. Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, basting often.

  2. Remove the bacon when done.

Serve

  1. Place the quails on a platter.

  2. Garnish with watercress.

  3. Pour rich brown gravy around the birds.

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. Quail + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Butter + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pork + watercresstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together318 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Quails
Form the main body of the dish, cooking through in the oven to become tender.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the birds brown and gives a rich flavour.
Fat pork
Bastes the breast as it melts, keeping the lean meat moist and adding flavour.

The step that matters

Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, basting often. Quail is lean and cooks quickly, so overcooking dries the meat. Frequent basting with the pan liquid and melted fat keeps the surface moist and promotes even browning.

“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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