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Roast Ducklings with Orange-sauce

Roasted ducklings stuffed with liver, heart, gizzard, and orange peel, served with a brown orange sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Ducklings with Orange-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Dress the ducklings as directed for other poultry.

  2. Chop the liver, heart, and gizzard.

  3. Grate the rind of the oranges and squeeze the juice.

  4. Mix the chopped liver, heart, gizzard, grated orange peel, and bread crumbs softened with cold water.

  5. Season the mixture with salt and pepper, stuff the ducklings, and truss them.

Roast

  1. Roast the ducklings in a 350°F (175°C) oven, basting with their own drippings or a little butter.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. When done, set the dripping pan over the fire.

  2. Stir in the flour with the drippings and brown it.

  3. Add the orange juice and enough hot water to achieve the desired sauce consistency.

  4. Let it boil, season with salt and pepper, and serve with the roast ducklings.

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

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

  2. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Liver + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together731 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Ducklings
Provide the rich meat and fat that form the main dish.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid in the stuffing, keeping it moist and lightly binding the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the drippings into a sauce as it browns with the fat.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruity sweetness that cut through the rich duck fat.
Orange rind
Adds aromatic citrus oil that flavours the stuffing and sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the drippings. Cooking flour in fat until it browns develops flavour and removes raw starch taste. Adding liquid too early, or stopping before colour forms, leaves the sauce pale and floury, and lumps form if liquid is added too fast.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, bread, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, bread, pepper, butter, 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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