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Canard Sauvage Roti, a LA Sauce Salmis

Roasted wild duck served with a sauce of its own juices, mashed livers, oil, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Canard Sauvage Roti, a LA Sauce Salmis

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Clean and dry the inside of the duck.

  2. Remove the bile from the liver and replace the liver in the duck.

  3. Add a few salted poultry livers and a peeled shallot to the duck.

  4. Truss the duck and roast until cooked through.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Remove the livers from inside the duck, mash them, and mix with oil, lemon juice, and the duck's juice.

  2. Serve the sauce separately alongside the duck.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Liver + shallottop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together268 recipes

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

  3. Liver + lemontop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together768 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

Wild duck
Provides the main meat, cooked whole by roasting.
Liver of the duck
Mashed into the sauce, giving it a rich, smooth body and deep flavour.
Salted poultry livers
Stuffed inside the duck, adding savoury richness that carries into the sauce.
Duck juice
Collects from the roasting bird and adds concentrated meaty flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich liver and duck flavours in the sauce.

The step that matters

Remove the bile from the liver. Bile is bitter and can taint the flavour of the liver. Removing it before the liver goes back into the duck keeps the sauce tasting clean and rich rather than bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, shallot):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Red currantfits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, shallot. 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.

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