Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Ducks

A dish of ducks roasted with salt, pepper, and optional onions, served with a bread filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ducks and rub them with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Toast the bread for the filling and crush it with a rolling pin.

  3. Season the crushed bread with black pepper, coarse sea salt, and chopped onion.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the ducks in a pan and roast for 3 hours.

  2. Optionally, roast 3-4 onions with the ducks.

  3. Serve the onions on the dish.

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 + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 becomes tender and juicy during long roasting.
Bread
Forms the base of the filling and soaks up flavour and moisture.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they roast alongside the ducks.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, 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.

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