Skip to main content
Main

Quails Boned and Rolled, with Tartare Sauce

Quails are boned, filled with a forcemeat of liver and tongue, rolled, and stewed in gravy with red currant jelly, sherry, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Quails Boned and Rolled, with Tartare Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy and tongues

  1. Make gravy with the gravy meat and stew the sheeps' tongues in it.

  2. Bone the quails and add the bones to the gravy.

  3. Trim the sheeps' tongues and cut nice fillets from the center.

  4. Dust the boned quails with spiced pepper, breast down on a board.

Make the forcemeat

  1. Melt the bacon in a frying pan.

  2. Add the lamb's liver and diced quail meat with the onion to the pan. Cook the liver mixture.

  3. Transfer the liver mixture to a mortar with remaining tongue scraps, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Work into a paste, then sieve it.

  4. Mix in parsley, garden-cress, thyme, lime peel, and truffles.

Stuff and braise

  1. Spread a layer of forcemeat over each quail, place a tongue fillet in the center, and add another layer of forcemeat. Shape the quails neatly and sew the skin together securely.

  2. Stew the quails in the gravy with red currant jelly, sherry, and vinegar. Lift them out, drain the gravy, and reduce it to a glaze.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Quail + lambtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Quails
Form the boned, stuffed body that holds the forcemeat and cooks through in the gravy.
Lamb's liver
Adds richness and a smooth, moist texture to the forcemeat.
Sheeps' tongues
Supply tender, meaty fillets that give the stuffed quail its centre.
Fat bacon
Melts to fat that carries flavour and keeps the forcemeat moist.
Sherry
Adds acidity and depth to the glaze reduced from the gravy.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and gloss to the glaze as it reduces.

The step that matters

Reducing the gravy to a glaze. Reducing concentrates the gravy's flavour and sugars, so it thickens and glazes the quail. If boiled too hard or too long it can scorch or turn overly salty and sticky.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (quail, lamb, liver, meat, pepper, parsley, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, lamb, liver, meat, pepper, parsley, thyme. 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

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipesMeat CakesMeat Cakes35 recipes