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Roast Canvas-back Duck

Roast canvasback duck seasoned with salt, pepper, celery, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Canvas-back Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Dress the canvasback duck.

  2. Place it before a very hot fire and quickly brown it.

  3. Cook for 20 minutes.

Season and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Serve hot with celery and currant jelly.

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 + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Pepper + curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Celery + curranttop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 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

Canvasback duck
Provides the main meat, whose fat renders and helps the skin brown during roasting.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness that balance the rich, fatty flavour of the duck.

The step that matters

Quickly brown it before a very hot fire. High heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction and seals in juices before the interior overcooks. Too little heat leaves the skin pale and the meat cooked longer than intended.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, celery):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, celery. 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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