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To Stew Wild Ducks

A stew of wild ducks cooked with salt, pepper, cloves, vinegar, water, lemon peel, herbs, and finished with lemon slices and fried bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Stew Wild Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the ducks by rubbing the insides with salt, pepper, and powdered cloves. Stuff each duck with a small amount of butter.

  2. Place the ducks in a pan, adding butter underneath and on top.

  3. Pour in vinegar and water, then add pepper, salt, lemon peel, and sweet herbs.

Stew and serve

  1. Cover the pan tightly and let the ducks stew until cooked through.

  2. Strain the cooking liquid through a sieve and pour it over the ducks.

  3. Serve hot, garnished with lemon slices and fried bread crumbs.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Wild ducks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the birds as they cook.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, gamey flavor of the duck.
Powdered cloves
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor to the ducks.

The step that matters

Cover the pan tightly and stew until cooked through. A tight lid traps steam so the ducks cook gently in their liquid. Too much heat or an open pan can dry the meat or toughen it before it is cooked through.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, vinegar, lemon, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, vinegar, lemon, bread. 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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