Skip to main content
Main

Roast Widgeon

Roast Widgeon is a dish of widgeons cooked over a brisk fire, dusted with flour and butter, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roast Widgeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Truss the widgeons like wild ducks.

  2. Place them over a brisk fire.

Roast

  1. Dust with flour and baste continually with butter.

  2. Cook until browned and nicely frothed, about 1 hour or 20 minutes longer for well done.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with brown gravy or orange gravy and a cut lemon.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Widgeons
The main protein, which cooks over direct heat to become tender and browned.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, it helps form a browned, crisp coating on the bird.
Butter
Basted over the bird, it adds richness and moisture and promotes browning on the skin.

The step that matters

Cook until browned and nicely frothed. Widgeon is a lean game bird that dries out quickly over a fire. Cooking until browned but not longer than needed keeps the meat juicy, and the extra 20 minutes for well done increases the risk of dryness.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes