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Stewed Duck

A stew of duck pieces simmered in butter, onion, parsley, cloves, sage, pepper, salt, and lemon, thickened with browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Stewed Duck

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Stewed Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the duck

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onion and parsley, and sauté until the onion is translucent.

  3. Add the duck pieces and brown them on all sides.

  4. Pour in enough hot water to cover the duck.

Simmer and finish

  1. Add the cloves, powdered sage, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover the saucepan and let it simmer until the duck is tender, adding more water as needed.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour, then add a squeeze of lemon juice.

  4. Serve garnished with croutons.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  3. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

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, whose connective tissue softens into tender meat during long simmering.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the onion and duck, building savory flavor in the pan.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, adding aromatic depth to the stew base.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as its starch swells with heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty flavor of the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the duck on all sides. Browning creates Maillard flavor on the meat's surface, which deepens the flavor of the final stew. Pale, steamed pieces make a flatter-tasting gravy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, clove, sage, pepper, flour, lemon. 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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