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Salmis of Quails

Quails stuffed with boiled bacon, roasted and served in a rich gravy with Madeira, livers, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 quail

  1. Clean the quails and stuff each with a roll of boiled bacon.

  2. Sew up the vents and truss the birds for roasting.

  3. Melt butter in a frying pan and brown the quails.

Make the sauce

  1. Transfer the quails to a stew pan and cover with rich gravy.

  2. Stew until the quails are cooked through.

  3. Remove the quails and thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  4. Color the gravy with caramel and add Madeira, pounded livers, red currant jelly, chili vinegar, and mushrooms.

  5. Heat the quails in the sauce and serve 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. Liver + mushroomtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together572 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 centrepiece of the dish.
Boiled bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that keeps the stuffed birds moist as they cook.
Butter
Browns the quails in the pan and enriches the thickened gravy with fat and flavour.
Rich gravy
Provides the liquid that gently cooks the quails and forms the base of the sauce.
Caramel
Colours the gravy a deep brown, adding a mild bittersweet flavour.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the sauce as it reduces.

The step that matters

Stew until the quails are cooked through. Stuffed birds cook unevenly, and the bacon and thick meat hide doneness. Cooking gently in liquid keeps the meat tender, while overcooking dries it out.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Applefits about as well
  3. Red currantthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, butter, liver, 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.

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