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Quails Baked

Baked quails wrapped in bacon, steamed then roasted with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Quail and butter work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 512 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Quails Baked

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and steam

  1. Split the quails at the back.

  2. Lay thin slices of bacon over the breast of each bird.

  3. Pour a little boiling water into the pan and cover it closely.

  4. Steam the quails on the stove for 10 minutes to plump them.

Roast and serve

  1. Remove the cover and bacon.

  2. Place the quails in the oven.

  3. Baste often with butter until the quails are brown.

  4. Serve hot.

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 + 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

Quails
The main meat, cooked through by steaming and then roasting until the skin browns.
Bacon
Lies over the breast, adding fat and savoury flavour as it renders during cooking.
Butter
Basting fat that helps the surface brown and turn golden.

The step that matters

Baste often with butter until the quails are brown. Butter adds fat and milk solids that help the surface brown through the Maillard reaction. Basting spreads the fat over the birds, keeping the skin from drying out before it colours.

“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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