Skip to main content
Main

Roasted Ducks

Roasted ducks seasoned with salt, pepper, sage, and a breadcrumb butter dressing, served with stewed cranberries or apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and sage 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 ↓

Roasted Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and truss the ducks like chickens.

  2. In a bowl, mix bread crumbs, butter, grated onion, salt, and pepper to make the dressing.

  3. Season the ducks inside and out with salt, pepper, and sage.

Roast

  1. Place the ducks in a roasting pan with a little water and cover with bits of drippings.

  2. Roast the ducks, basting often as they cook.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For the gravy, stew and chop the giblets, then pour off most of the fat from the pan.

  2. Thicken the remaining juices with flour and season well.

  3. Serve with stewed cranberries or apple sauce.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which is roasted whole and basted to keep it moist.
Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the dressing, soaking up butter and juices to give it a soft texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dressing and helps it brown in the oven.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy.

The step that matters

Basting the ducks while they roast. Duck has a lot of fat under the skin, and regular basting helps the skin brown and keeps the meat from drying out as the juices and fat render.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, sage, 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.

More roasted duck recipes

with Stuffing 4with Head 3 See all 113 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes