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Roast Ducks

A dish of ducks roasted with sage, onion, bread crumbs, and a gravy thickened with browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the stuffing for one duck with sage and onion.

  2. For the other duck, mix bread crumbs with pepper, salt, and milk.

Roast

  1. Lay the ducks in a dripping pan and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Roast the ducks, basting often, until tender and brown.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the fat from the gravy, season, thicken with browned flour, and boil.

  2. Serve the gravy in a gravy boat.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and browned through roasting.
Sage
Adds an aromatic herbal flavour to the stuffing.
Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the stuffing and soak up moisture and flavour.
Browning flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the spoon instead of running thin.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, bread, pepper, milk, 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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