Name: Filets of Wild Duck, with Orange-sauce
Ingredients: filets of wild duck; rind of 1 Seville or bitter orange; juice of 1 Seville or bitter orange; ½ cup broth; ⅓ cup madeira; salt to taste; cayenne pepper to taste

Why it works: Bitter orange and pepper work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Filets of Wild Duck, with Orange-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

Cook the filets of wild duck by broiling or roasting them rare.

Make the orange sauce

While the duck is cooking, cut the orange rind into small shreds and squeeze the juice of the orange.
In a saucepan, combine the orange rind, orange juice, broth, and madeira.
Season the sauce with salt and cayenne pepper.
Simmer the sauce for five minutes.

Serve

Serve the sauce with the filets of wild duck.

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.

Bitter orange + peppertop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12 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

Filets of wild duck: Is the main protein; cooked rare, it stays tender and moist.
Orange rind: Adds aromatic oils and a bitter citrus flavour to the sauce.
Orange juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances the duck.
Madeira: Adds sweetness and depth as it reduces in the sauce.
Broth: Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.

The step that matters

Cooking the duck rare. Wild duck is lean and dries out quickly when overcooked. Cooking it only to rare keeps the meat juicy and tender, and the sauce is served with it.

“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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Filets of Wild Duck, with Orange-sauce