Skip to main content
Main

Roast Duck

Roast Duck is a whole duck roasted with onion stuffing, sage, breadcrumbs, butter, and served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and pepper 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 Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and dry the duck.

  2. Soak the chopped onions in cold water.

  3. Mix sage leaves, bread crumbs, and butter in a bowl.

  4. Drain the onions and add them to the mixture with salt and pepper.

  5. Stuff the duck with the mixture.

Roast and make gravy

  1. Dredge and baste the duck like a turkey.

  2. Roast the duck for over an hour.

  3. Strain the drippings.

  4. Skim off the fat.

  5. Stir in browned flour and mixed mustard into the drippings.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck hot with currant jelly.

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

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

  2. Sage + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Sage + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Is the main dish, providing the meat and fat that the cooking drippings come from.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and fat from the butter and onions, giving the stuffing a soft, moist body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the stuffing, helping it stay moist during roasting.
Browned flour
Thickens the drippings into a gravy and adds a deeper, toasted flavour.

The step that matters

Skim off the fat. Duck releases a large amount of fat while roasting. Leaving too much in the drippings makes the gravy greasy and thin, so the fat should be removed before thickening.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

More roast duck recipes

Olive Sauce for 3with Apples 3 See all 98 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes