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Roast Duck

Roast duck stuffed with sage and onion, served with gravy, watercress garnish, and apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Singe the duck and draw it.

  2. Cut off the wing bones at the first joint and the toes.

  3. Scald and skin the feet, then fold them onto the back of the bird.

  4. Fill the body with sage and onion stuffing and fasten with skewers.

  5. Make a small slit in the skin at the apron and catch the tip of the tail.

  6. Truss the bird with needle and string, securing the skin at the tail.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the duck in a tin with 2 oz of hot dripping.

  2. Roast for 1 to 2.5 hours, basting frequently.

  3. Serve with thickened gravy, garnished with watercress, and apple 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 + watercresstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + watercresstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together533 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Watercress + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together295 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Provides the main meat, whose fat renders during roasting to crisp the skin.
Sage and onion stuffing
Fills the body, adding moisture and aroma to the meat as it cooks.
Hot dripping
Conducts heat into the skin and promotes even browning while basting.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, onion, watercress, sauce. 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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