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Duck, with Turnips

A roasted duck served with browned turnips, flavored with butter, brown sugar, broth, spices, and garnished with herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Duck, with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the turnips

  1. Fry the small turnips in a frying pan with butter and brown sugar until browned.

Cook the duck

  1. Bake the duck in a baking pan with butter until it has a good color.

  2. Add the browned turnips to the duck.

  3. Moisten with broth.

  4. Add spices.

  5. Finish cooking.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a mixture of butter and flour before serving.

  2. Garnish with herbs.

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. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Turnip + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Duck
Is the main protein, and its fat and juices flavour and moisten the dish as it bakes.
Small turnips
Provide the bulk of the vegetable element and take on sweetness and colour when browned.
Brown sugar
Caramelises during frying, adding sweetness and deeper browning to the turnips.
Broth
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the duck as it finishes cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the turnips and duck brown evenly.

The step that matters

Browning the turnips. Frying the turnips until well browned depends on enough heat and not overcrowding the pan. Pale, steamed turnips lack the caramelised sweetness that brown sugar and Maillard browning provide, so the flavour of the dish suffers.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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