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To Roast Wild Ducks

Roasted wild ducks served with a gravy made from their necks and gizzards, onion, wine, anchovy, mace, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,260 recipes. Both carry hexanol, which smells green, fruity. The science ↓

To Roast Wild Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the ducks

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. After dressing the ducks, stuff them with a small onion, pepper, salt, and 1 tablespoon of wine.

Roast and make the gravy

  1. Roast the ducks for about 20 minutes if the fire is good.

  2. For the gravy, boil the necks and gizzards with 1 tablespoon of wine, ½ anchovy, 1-2 blades of mace, 1 onion, and a pinch of cayenne pepper until reduced to ½ pint.

  3. Strain the gravy and pour it over the roasted ducks.

Serve

  1. Serve with an onion sauce and garnish the dish with small pieces of browned bread.

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. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

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

  3. Onion + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Wild ducks
Provide the main meat, which is cooked by roasting until done.
Necks and gizzards of the ducks
Simmered into the gravy, adding savoury, meaty flavour to the sauce.
Anchovy
Adds a deep savoury note to the gravy that rounds out the flavour.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the stuffing and the gravy.

The step that matters

Roasting the ducks. Wild duck is lean and dries out quickly at high heat, so timing must be watched closely. The record gives only about 20 minutes, and that depends on how good the fire is, so checking doneness matters.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, pepper, wine, anchovy, bread):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, pepper, wine, anchovy, 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.

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