Skip to main content
Main

Roast Quails

Roast quails stuffed, seasoned, and baked with butter and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quail and butter work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. 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

  1. Wipe the quails clean and rub them inside and out with salt and pepper.

  2. Stuff the quails with your chosen dressing and sew them up with fine thread.

Roast

  1. Spread butter over the quails and place them in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  2. Turn and baste the quails often with hot water seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

  3. Bake for 45 minutes, adding a little hot water to the pan halfway through.

  4. Cover the quails with a dripping pan to prevent excessive browning.

Make the gravy

  1. To make gravy, mix flour and butter together and add to the pan, along with water if needed.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 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
The main protein; roasting cooks the lean meat through while the skin crisps.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor and helps the skin brown in the oven.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy when mixed with butter.
Dressing
Fills the birds, adding flavor and moisture as they roast.

The step that matters

Baste and bake for 45 minutes. Quail is small and lean, so it dries out quickly if overcooked. Regular basting with hot seasoned water adds moisture to the surface, and adding hot water to the pan halfway keeps the juices from evaporating too fast.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes