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Quails Pak-boiled and Baked

Quails are wrapped in bacon, steamed, then baked and served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Quails Pak-boiled and Baked

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Tie a slice of bacon over the breast of each quail.

Steam

  1. Cover the quails and steam them on top of the range for 10 to 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the cover and the bacon.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the quails in the oven, basting them often with butter.

  2. Bake until browned and serve with currant jelly.

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. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Quail + curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together64 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Quails
Provide the lean meat that is the main component of the dish.
Thin slices of bacon
Wrap the breast to add fat, which keeps the lean meat moist and adds savory flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and helps the surface brown while the quails bake.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness that contrast with the rich, savory meat.

The step that matters

Basting the quails with butter in the oven. Quail is very lean and dries out quickly. Frequent basting with melted butter coats the surface in fat, which keeps the meat moist and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, butter. 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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