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Beoiled Wild Ducks

Broiled wild ducks seasoned with coarse sea salt, served with butter, watercress, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beoiled Wild Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress, clean, and wipe the ducks.

  2. Sprinkle the ducks with coarse sea salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the ducks for fifteen minutes.

  2. Remove the ducks to a hot serving dish.

  3. Spread with Maitre d'Hotel Butter.

  4. Garnish with watercress and slices of lemon.

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. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  3. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild ducks
Provide the main meat, which is cooked by direct broiling heat.
Maitre d'hotel butter
Adds fat and herb flavour that moistens the hot meat when spread on top.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Pearfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, watercress. 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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