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To Roast Ducks

Roasted ducks stuffed with onion, sage, salt, pepper, served with onion sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

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

Prepare the ducks

  1. Draw the ducks and stuff them with the shredded onion, sage leaves, salt, and pepper.

  2. Spit the ducks and dust them with flour.

  3. Baste the ducks with lard.

Roast and finish

  1. Roast in a very hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for about 20 minutes.

  2. Just before removing from the spit, dust with flour and baste again.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Prepare gravy using the gizzards and pinions, mace, peppercorns, catsup, and lemon pickle.

  2. Strain the gravy and pour it over the ducks.

  3. Serve with onion sauce on the side.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

  5. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Ducks
The main protein, cooked whole on a spit so the fat renders and the skin browns.
Flour
Dusted on the surface to help the skin brown and crisp during roasting.
Lard
Basted over the birds to add fat, which promotes browning and a rich flavor.
Onion
Stuffed inside the birds to add aroma and moisture as they roast.
Gizzards and pinions
Simmered to make a flavorful stock base for the gravy.

The step that matters

Roast in a very hot oven. A very hot oven browns the skin and renders fat quickly. Too low a heat leaves the fat unrendered and the skin pale and greasy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, sage, pepper, flour, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, sage, pepper, flour, lemon. 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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