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Canvas-back Duck Broiled

Broiled canvas-back ducks seasoned with salt, pepper, and oil, served with maitre d'hotel butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Canvas-back Duck Broiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat your broiler.

  2. Split the ducks down the back without detaching them.

  3. Season the ducks with salt, pepper, and oil, rolling them well in the mixture.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil the ducks for 7 to 8 minutes on each side.

  2. Transfer to a hot dish, spread with maitre d'hotel butter, garnish, and serve.

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 + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Canvas-back ducks
Provide the main protein, with rich fat that bastes the meat as it cooks.
Oil
Helps the seasoning coat the skin evenly and encourages browning under the broiler.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and draws out moisture from the skin surface, aiding browning.

The step that matters

Broil the ducks for 7 to 8 minutes on each side. Duck skin is fatty and can burn before the meat is cooked through under intense direct heat. Watching the color and turning at the stated time helps the fat render and the skin crisp evenly.

“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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