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Stewed Ducks

A stew of ducks cooked with bacon, giblets, onions, bread, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ducks

  1. Truss the ducks and stuff them with bread, butter, and onions.

  2. Heat lard in a frying pan and add the ducks.

Stew

  1. In an iron pot, combine bacon, giblets, water, pepper, salt, and mace or cloves if using.

  2. Add the ducks to the pot and let them stew gently for 2 hours, turning occasionally.

  3. Flour the ducks each time you turn them in the pot.

Finish the sauce

  1. Thicken the sauce with butter rolled in flour before serving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Bread
Stuffing that absorbs juices and adds bulk and mild texture inside the birds.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the stuffing and the sauce.
Flour
Coats the ducks and thickens the sauce as it binds with the cooking liquid.
Lemon juice or lemon pickle
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty flavour of the stewed duck.

The step that matters

Flouring the ducks at each turn. Flour that is added each time the ducks are turned coats the surface and dissolves into the liquid, thickening the sauce gradually. Adding it all at once or skipping it can leave lumps or a thin sauce.

Swap the mace

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

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

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