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Stewed Ducks

A duck stewed with onion, stock, ketchup, and sherry, finished with roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Season the jointed duck with pepper, salt, and flour.

  2. Heat the dripping in a frying pan.

  3. Fry the sliced onion until light brown. Remove the onion.

  4. Add the duck to the pan, cooking for 10 minutes while turning it two or three times.

Stew

  1. In a saucepan, place the cold stock or consommé. Add the jointed duck to the saucepan.

  2. Cover the saucepan. Stew slowly until tender.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, tomato ketchup, and lemon juice. Simmer for three minutes.

  4. Stir in the brown roux. Cook for one minute to thicken. Add the sherry. Serve.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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 through slow stewing.
Flour
Coats the duck so it browns in the dripping and helps thicken the sauce.
Brown roux
Thickens the stewing liquid into a smooth, richer sauce.
Onion
Browned first in the dripping to add savoury depth and aroma to the sauce.
Sherry
Adds a sharp, aromatic note that brightens the rich stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the duck until well turned. Turning the pieces during the 10 minutes of frying browns them evenly; browning builds flavour through the Maillard reaction, which carries into the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, tomato, ketchup, lemon, sherry):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, tomato, ketchup, lemon, sherry. 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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