Skip to main content
Main

Quails a LA Sandringham

Quails stuffed with liver, bacon, tongue, and spices, baked and served with a coconut and chutney sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Quails a LA Sandringham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pound together the minced liver, bacon, tongue, and seasonings with the bread crumbs, egg, and stock.

  2. Stuff the quails with this mixture.

Cook the quails

  1. Cook in the oven at 400°F (200°C) with a little stock in the pan for 15 minutes.

  2. Roll the remaining mixture into balls.

  3. Coat them in egg and bread crumbs.

  4. Fry in hot fat for 2 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the bones of the birds with the onion in butter.

  2. Add the stock, chutney, extract of meat, and coconut.

  3. Cook for 20 minutes.

  4. Thicken the sauce with potato flour.

  5. Strain.

Assemble and serve

  1. Prepare a deep potato wall.

  2. Cut the birds into slices.

  3. Place the slices in the center of the wall.

  4. Arrange the balls around the top.

  5. Secure them with puree of peas or potatoes using a piping bag.

  6. 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Liver + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,420 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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, which is cooked whole and then sliced for serving.
Liver
Adds richness and a dense, savoury body to the forcemeat filling.
Bread crumbs
Bind the forcemeat and coat the balls, giving a crisp, golden outer layer when fried.
Egg
Binds the forcemeat and forms a coating that helps the crumbs adhere.
Potato flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the birds.
Bacon fat
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the filling and helps keep it moist.

The step that matters

Frying the coated balls. Fat must be hot before the balls go in. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy instead of crisping quickly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, liver, bread, egg, onion, butter, meat. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes