Name: Broiled Quails
Ingredients: quails; cold water; butter; buttered toast; currant jelly

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 ↓

Broiled Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Split the quails at the back and wash them.
Soak the quails in cold water for 20 minutes to bleach them.
Wipe the quails dry and broil them over a bright fire, keeping the bone side to the fire.
Turn the quails only once a minute to prevent burning and baste with butter.
Broil until they are a nice yellow brown all over.
Serve on buttered toast with a little currant jelly on top of each quail.

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.

Quail + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together512 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,856 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Quail + curranttop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together64 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).