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To Roast Ducks

Roast ducks seasoned with salt and pepper, served with optional onion and crushed bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ducks and rub them with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Toast the bread and crush it with a rolling pin.

  3. Season the crushed bread with black pepper, coarse sea salt, and chopped onion.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the ducks in a pan and roast for 3 hours.

  2. Optionally, roast 3-4 onions with the ducks and serve them on the dish.

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 + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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, whose fat renders during roasting to moisten and crisp the skin.
Bread
Forms the filling base, absorbing seasoning and juices as it is crushed and mixed.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they roast alongside the ducks.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, 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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