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Roast Ducks

A roasted duck recipe with bread crumb stuffing, sage seasoning, and a gravy served with cranberry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and prepare the ducks as you would other poultry.

  2. In a bowl, mix the bread crumbs, butter, chopped onion, pepper, and salt.

  3. Season the ducks inside and out with pepper, salt, and sage.

  4. Fill the ducks with the dressing and skewer them tightly.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the ducks in a pan, back side up, and dredge with flour.

  2. Add a tablespoon of flour to the pan and enough water to make gravy.

  3. Roast until nicely browned, turning them over and basting frequently.

  4. Serve hot with cranberry sauce.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Sage + cranberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Pepper + cranberrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which is seasoned, stuffed and roasted until browned.
Bread crumbs
Soak up butter and onion juices to form a moist, savoury dressing inside the birds.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the dressing moist and helps the skin brown during roasting.
Flour
Dredged on the ducks and stirred into the pan juices to thicken the gravy.

The step that matters

Roast until nicely browned, turning and basting frequently. Duck has a lot of fat under the skin. Turning and basting help that fat render and spread heat evenly, so the skin browns without burning and the meat cooks through.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, sage, flour, cranberry, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, sage, flour, cranberry, sauce. 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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