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Roast Duck

Roast Duck is a whole duck roasted with sage and onion stuffing, served with brown gravy, currant jelly, and optional green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,628 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Duck

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

  1. Wash and dry the duck carefully.

  2. Make a stuffing with sage and onion, then insert it into the duck and sew it up to prevent the stuffing from escaping.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the duck in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about one hour, basting it regularly.

  2. Serve with a good brown gravy poured over the duck.

  3. Accompany with currant jelly and green peas if in season.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + peastop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,460 recipes

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

  3. Sage + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sage + curranttop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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, and its fat renders during roasting to keep the meat moist and crisp the skin.
Sage
Adds a savoury, aromatic flavour to the stuffing that perfumes the meat as it cooks.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and moisture to the stuffing as it cooks inside the bird.
Currant jelly
Adds sweet-tart acidity that balances the rich, fatty flavour of the duck.

The step that matters

Basting the duck regularly. Basting spreads rendered fat and pan juices over the skin, helping it brown and crisp while keeping the surface from drying out during roasting.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sage, onion, currant):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, onion, currant. 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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