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Ducklings, with Seville Orange Sauce

Ducklings roasted and served with a sauce made from Spanish sauce, Seville orange juice, cayenne pepper, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Ducklings, with Seville Orange Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ducklings

  1. Truss the ducklings with their legs drawn in.

  2. Roast the ducklings until they are slightly under-done.

  3. Make incisions in the breast of the ducklings.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the boiling Spanish sauce with the gravy from the ducklings.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of the Seville orange and season with cayenne pepper and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Dish the ducklings and pour the sauce over them.

  2. Roast 3 ducklings.

  3. Cut out the fillets.

  4. Place the fillets in the sauce and gravy.

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. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + orangetop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together723 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Ducklings
Main protein; their fat renders during roasting and enriches the gravy that forms the sauce.
Seville orange juice
Adds acidity that cuts through the rich duck fat and brightens the sauce.
Spanish sauce
Brown sauce base that gives the sauce body and savoury depth.

The step that matters

Roast the ducklings until slightly under-done. Duck keeps cooking as it rests and when its fillets return to the hot sauce, so roasting too long leaves the meat dry and tough.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, 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.

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