Skip to main content
Main

Roast Duck

Roast Duck is dish where duck is stuffed with bread crumbs, stock, onion, salt, cayenne, cracker crumbs, butter, celery, then roasted and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Duck

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Clean the duck thoroughly and stuff it with the bread crumbs, stock, onion, salt, cayenne, cracker crumbs, and a large lump of butter.

  2. Sprinkle the celery with cayenne pepper and stuff it into the duck after dressing.

Roast and make the gravy

  1. Roast the duck for 1.5 hours until done and crispy yellow.

  2. For the gravy, chop the grizzles and roast them in the same pan as the duck.

  3. When done, thicken the gravy with flour and cream.

Serve

  1. Garnish with parsley before serving.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Is the main dish, cooking to a crispy yellow skin as it roasts.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the juices and fat inside the bird, giving the stuffing a soft, moist texture.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the spoon rather than running thin.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the gravy, softening its flavour.
Cracker crumbs
Add dry bulk and a toasted note to the stuffing, helping it hold together.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour and cream. Flour must be cooked into the hot pan fat or stock before cream is added; otherwise it stays raw-tasting and clumps, and cream added to a boil can split.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, celery, butter, flour, cream, parsley):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, celery, butter, flour, cream, parsley. 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.

More roasted duck recipes

with Stuffing 4with Head 3 See all 113 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes