Skip to main content
Main

Potted Quail

A dish of quails cooked with larding pork, butter, and water, served with toasted bread and a creamy gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Quail and pork work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 308 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Potted Quail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the quail

  1. Singe the quails.

  2. Draw the quails.

  3. Wash the quails quickly.

  4. Season them with salt evenly distributed.

Braise the quail

  1. Fry the larding pork in a saucepan until light brown.

  2. Add butter and the quails.

  3. Cook until they are light brown all over.

  4. Add boiling water and continue cooking for about an hour.

Cook the giblets

  1. Cover giblets with cold water in another saucepan.

  2. Add a little salt and onion.

  3. Boil until tender.

  4. Chop the giblets finely.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Toast the bread.

  2. Butter it.

  3. Place one quail on each piece.

  4. Mix corn starch with cold water.

  5. Stir it into the gravy.

  6. Cook for 2 minutes.

  7. Add some giblet-water to make a creamy sauce.

  8. Strain the gravy.

  9. Add the giblets.

  10. Pour a little gravy over each quail.

  11. Serve the rest separately.

  12. Decorate the dish with watercress.

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 + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. Pork + corntop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,069 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,205 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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 becomes tender through slow braising in liquid.
Larding pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the pan as it renders and browns.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the quail brown in the pan.
Corn starch
Thickens the gravy so it becomes smooth and creamy rather than watery.

The step that matters

Add the cornstarch slurry to the gravy. Cornstarch must be mixed with cold water first and then stirred into hot liquid, which prevents lumps. It thickens only when the liquid is hot enough and simmered briefly, so the gravy needs to cook for the stated time to lose its raw starch taste and reach full thickness.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against quail, pork, butter, bread, corn. 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 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipes