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Roast Quails

Roast quails stuffed with raw oysters, wrapped in bacon, and served with buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Oyster and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,184 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. 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. Wipe the quails inside and out with a soft, damp cloth.

  2. Place a raw oyster inside each quail.

  3. Truss the quails as you would a chicken.

  4. Bind a slice of 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. Cover and roast in an oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes, basting three times with a mixture of butter and water.

  3. Season with butter, pepper, and salt, then 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. Oyster + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Quail + oystertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together52 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Quail + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together391 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quails
Provide the meat, which is roasted whole and cooked through under cover.
Bacon
Wraps the breast, adding fat that bastes the lean meat and flavours it as it renders.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for basting, helping the skin and meat brown and taste savoury.
Raw oysters
Placed inside the birds, they add a briny, savoury flavour to the meat as it cooks.
Toast
Soaks up the roasting gravy, giving a moist base that carries the juices.

The step that matters

Basting with butter and water. Basting during roasting keeps the surface of the lean quail from drying out and helps it brown evenly. Adding water to the pan also produces steam and gravy that moistens the birds and the toast.

“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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