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85 Quails

A dish of 85 quails stuffed with stuffing, wrapped in vine leaves and bacon, roasted and served with fried bread crumbs, gravy, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

85 Quails

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stuff the crops of the quails with stuffing.

  2. Lay a vine leaf on each quail's breast and cover with a strip of bacon.

  3. Skewer the quails together and tie them to a spit.

Roast

  1. When nearly done, remove the bacon and baste the quails with butter.

  2. Cook until they are a delicate brown.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with fried bread crumbs and a side of clear gravy with a squeeze of lemon juice.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Quail + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 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 main protein, which cooks to a tender, moist meat under roasting.
Bacon
Bastes the breast with its rendered fat and protects the lean meat from drying out.
Butter
Adds fat that promotes browning and a rich, golden finish on the birds.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich fat of the gravy and bird.

The step that matters

Remove the bacon and baste near the end. Removing the bacon late lets the breast brown directly, and basting with butter promotes even browning. Leaving the bacon on too long can burn it or stop the skin from colouring.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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