Skip to main content
Main

Roast Duck with Orange Juice

Roast duck stuffed with bacon, butter, onions, mushrooms, herbs, and parsley, baked and served with a gravy-orange sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,485 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Duck with Orange Juice

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Mince the duck livers with the bacon, butter, green onions, mushrooms, herbs, and parsley. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Stuff the ducks with the liver mixture and cover with slices of bacon.

Roast and make the sauce

  1. Wrap the ducks in paper and roast them in the oven.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the gravy, orange juice, minced shallots, and a dash of pepper. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

  1. Once the ducks are roasted, place them on a hot platter. Remove the bacon from the ducks. Pour the sauce over the ducks.

  2. Serve hot, garnished with curly parsley.

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. Thyme + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,485 recipes

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

  2. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sage + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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 becomes tender and juicy when roasted slowly.
Bacon
Its fat bastes the duck and adds savoury flavour as it renders.
Duck livers
Add a rich, concentrated flavour to the stuffing.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the stuffing brown and taste rounded.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruity brightness that balances the rich duck fat.
Gravy
Forms the body of the sauce and adds savoury depth.

The step that matters

Wrap the ducks in paper and roast them in the oven. Duck has a thick layer of fat under the skin that must render out slowly; wrapping keeps the meat moist while the fat drains, so the bird cooks through without drying.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, mushroom, thyme, sage, parsley, pepper):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, mushroom, thyme, sage, parsley, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes