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Roast Ducks

Roast Ducks is a dish of ducks stuffed with bread crumbs, pepper, salt, sage, and onion, then roasted and basted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 the ducks

  1. Wipe the ducks dry inside and out.

  2. Stuff the ducks with a mixture of bread crumbs, pepper, salt, sage, and minced onion.

  3. Sew up the ducks and place them in a dripping pan.

Roast and baste

  1. Dash boiling water over the ducks and roast covered for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the cover and baste the ducks three times with butter and water, and four to five times with the pan gravy.

Serve

  1. Stew the giblets in salted water and use to make gravy.

  2. Serve the ducks on a hot platter.

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

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

  4. Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 roasted until cooked through and served whole.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices inside the cavity and give the stuffing a soft, moist body.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, helping the skin brown and turn golden in the oven.
Powdered sage
Adds a savory, herbal aroma to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Remove the cover and baste the ducks. Basting spreads fat and pan liquid over the skin, promoting even browning and keeping the surface from drying out once the cover is off.

Swap the onion

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

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

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