Skip to main content
Main

Salmis of Quails

A dish of quails stuffed with boiled bacon, cooked in a rich gravy with bacon, marsala, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Salmis of Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quails

  1. Clean the quails.

  2. Stuff each quail with a roll of boiled bacon.

  3. Sew up the vents of the quails.

  4. Truss the birds as for roasting.

Sear and stew

  1. Heat butter and diced bacon in a frying pan until brown.

  2. Remove the bacon from the pan.

  3. Sear the quails in the pan until they are nicely colored.

  4. Transfer the quails to a stew pan.

  5. Cover the quails with rich gravy.

  6. Add the bacon to the stew pan.

  7. Stew the quails until cooked through.

  8. Remove the quails from the stew pan.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  2. Color the gravy with caramel.

  3. Stir in marsala.

  4. Stir in pounded livers.

  5. Stir in red currant jelly.

  6. Stir in chili vinegar.

  7. Stir in minced mushrooms.

  8. Heat the quails in the sauce.

  9. Serve the quails hot with dry toast.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Red currant + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Red currant + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Quail + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 through during gentle stewing in the gravy.
Streaky bacon
Adds salty, savoury fat and browned flavour to the birds and the sauce.
Butter
Carries browning in the pan and enriches the thickened gravy with richness.
Marsala
Adds wine acidity and sweet, fortified depth to the sauce.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body that balances the acidity of the sauce.
Mushrooms
Contribute earthy aroma and savoury umami to the gravy.

The step that matters

Sear the quails until nicely colored. Browning the skin in hot fat builds flavour through the Maillard reaction. Searing before stewing keeps the surface from turning pale and soft in the liquid.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Apricotfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, butter, vinegar, mushroom. 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes