Skip to main content
Main

Roast Quails

Roast quails stuffed with raw oysters and bacon, seasoned with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt, served on buttered toast with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Roast Quails

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 quail

  1. Draw and clean the quails with a soft, damp cloth.

  2. Place a whole raw oyster inside each quail.

  3. Truss the quails as you would a chicken.

  4. Bind thin slices of fat bacon over the breast of each quail.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the quails on a roasting rack and add a little hot water underneath.

  2. Cook covered in a lively oven at 400°F (200°C) for twenty minutes, basting three times with a mixture of butter and water.

  3. Season with butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt, and serve on squares of buttered toast soaked with gravy from the roaster.

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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,545 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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
Form the main dish; the lean meat is cooked whole and kept moist under the bacon.
Whole raw oysters
Sit inside each bird, where their briny juices flavour the meat as it roasts.
Fat bacon
Bastes the breast as it renders, adding fat, moisture and browning to the lean quail.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the skin during basting.

The step that matters

Cooking covered in a hot oven. Quail is small and lean, so it dries out quickly. A lively oven cooks it fast, and basting with butter and water keeps the surface moist and golden.

“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 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes