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Quail on Toast

A dish of roasted quail served on toast with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Quail on Toast

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

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cut open the backs of the quails and season them.

  3. Dredge the quails in flour.

Bake and fry

  1. In a covered baking pan, combine water and butter.

  2. Arrange the quails in the pan and bake for 10 minutes.

  3. In a chafing dish, melt the remaining butter until hot.

  4. Remove the quails from the oven and fry them until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Place the toast on a platter.

  2. Top each slice with a quail.

  3. Pour over the gravy made from the pan juices thickened with flour.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Quail + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 browns and cooks through in the oven and hot butter.
Flour
Coats the quails so they brown well, and thickens the pan juices into gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the quails fry to a golden brown.
Toast
Gives a crisp, absorbent base that holds the quails and gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the quails until golden brown. After a short bake the quails need quick high heat in hot butter to brown the flour coating. Overcrowding or too little heat steams the coating instead, leaving it pale and soft.

“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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