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Roast Duck

A roasted duck served with currant jelly, apple sauce, and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sage work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Roast Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Dress and stuff the duck as you would other fowls.

  2. If the duck is old, parboil it before roasting.

  3. Roast young ducks for 25 to 30 minutes, and full-grown ducks for 1 hour or more, basting frequently.

Serve

  1. Serve with currant jelly, apple sauce, and green peas.

Use leftovers

  1. For leftovers, place the remains in a stew pan with 2 cups of gravy and a little sage.

  2. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, then add 2 cups of boiled green peas.

  3. Stew for a few minutes, then serve with the gravy and peas.

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. Apple + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Apple + peastop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together192 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Peas + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Currant + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Duck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and browned as it roasts.
Currant jelly
Adds sweet-tart acidity that cuts through the rich duck fat.
Apple sauce
Adds moisture and mild sweetness that balance the rich, fatty meat.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the duck and leftovers.

The step that matters

Roasting time by duck age. Young and full-grown ducks need very different roasting times. Undercooking leaves the meat unsafe, while overcooking dries it out. Basting keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sauce, peas, sage):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sauce, peas, sage. 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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