Skip to main content
Main

Roast Duck

Roast Duck is a dish where ducks are seasoned, stuffed with a bread, butter, onion mixture, dredged, roasted, and served with cranberry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

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

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

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

Roast and serve

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

  2. Add enough water to the pan to make gravy.

  3. Roast until nicely browned, turning them over halfway through. Baste frequently and 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + cranberrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's bread
Forms the bulk of the dressing and soaks up butter and juices, giving the stuffing body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dressing and helps the skin brown during roasting.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and moisture to the dressing as it softens while cooking.
Flour
Dusted on the skin, it helps the surface brown and thicken the pan drippings for gravy.

The step that matters

Skewer the ducks tightly after filling. Stuffing expands as it heats, and loose skewering lets it spill out or leaves the dressing unevenly cooked, so the ducks should be closed firmly before roasting.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

More roast duck recipes

Olive Sauce for 3with Apples 3 See all 98 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes