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Quails Au Gratin

A baked dish of quails stuffed with farce and served in a bread roll with bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and bread work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Quails Au Gratin

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a sharp oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Bone the quails.

  2. Cut the bread into a cork shape, about 2½ inches in diameter and height.

  3. Surround the bread with a thin slice of bacon fat and place it in the center of a dish.

  4. Garnish around the bread with farce fine, sloping to the edge of the dish.

Assemble and bake

  1. Season the quails with fines herbes and salt, then fill them with farce to restore their plumpness.

  2. Arrange the quails with the breasts facing outward on the farce.

  3. Add a little more farce on top of the birds, leaving the breasts bare.

  4. Cover the breasts with a thin slice of fat bacon.

  5. Bake in a hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for about 45 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the bread roll and soak up excess fat with a sponge.

  2. Fill the bread roll with a good brown Italian sauce or scalloped truffles in a gipsey sauce.

  3. Glaze the breasts and serve.

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 + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 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; their filling with farce keeps the birds plump during baking.
Farce fine
Forms a moist stuffing that fills the birds and cushions the breasts from direct heat.
Bacon fat
Wraps the bread and breasts, adding fat that bastes the birds and keeps them moist.

The step that matters

Covering the breasts with bacon fat. Lean breast meat dries out quickly in a hot oven, so the thin fat layer protects it and keeps it moist during the roughly 45 minutes of baking.

“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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