Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Ducks

A dish of ducks stewed in a sage and onion gravy thickened with browned flour and finished with sherry, lemon, and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Stewed Ducks

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 the gravy

  1. Draw, wash, and stuff the ducks with onion and sage.

  2. Make gravy by simmering giblets and chopped onion in 1 pint of water for 2 hours. Season the gravy and set it aside with the giblets.

Stew the ducks

  1. On the next day, place the ducks in a roasting pan and pour in the gravy, adding water to half cover the ducks.

  2. Cover with another pan and stew at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours, or cook in a large saucepan on the stove for the same time.

  3. Once cooked, place the ducks on a hot dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with browned flour, then stir in the brown sherry and lemon juice.

  2. Garnish the dish with fried bread and pour the gravy over everything.

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 + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

  2. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sherry + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together682 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Sage + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the duck instead of running thin.
Brown sherry
Adds depth and a mildly sweet, nutty flavour to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its fattiness.
Giblets
Simmered into the gravy to build a deeper, meatier savoury base.

The step that matters

Stewing the ducks gently and covered. Slow, covered stewing at a steady moderate heat keeps the duck moist and lets the connective tissue soften. Too much heat can toughen the meat and reduce the gravy too quickly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sage, flour, sherry, lemon, bread):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, flour, sherry, lemon, bread. 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.

More stewed duck recipes

with Peas 4and Peas 3with Green Peas 3with Turnips 3 See all 45 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes