Skip to main content
Main

Quail with Lettuce

A dish of roasted quails served with boiled and buttered lettuce.

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

Why it works: Lettuce and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 184 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Quail with Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuces

  1. Boil the lettuces for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove the lettuces and grate nutmeg inside them.

  3. Tie the lettuces into balls and place them in a stewpan with butter.

  4. Simmer for 30 minutes.

  5. Drain the lettuces.

Cook and serve

  1. Roast the quails.

  2. Place the lettuces in a frying pan under the quails for 10 minutes before serving.

  3. Arrange the quails and lettuces alternately on a round dish.

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. Lettuce + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + quailtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + quailtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  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

Lettuces
Hold their shape as wrapped balls and become tender through boiling and simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture while the lettuces simmer.
Quails
Provide the main meat, browned by roasting.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the lettuces.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

Creamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes