Skip to main content
Main

Roast Wild Duck

A roasted wild duck prepared with salt, pepper, butter, and a dressing of bread crumbs, fat pork, and sage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Roast Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the duck

  1. Pluck, singe, draw, and wash the duck, then soak it in salt water for 20 minutes.

  2. Rinse the duck in cold water, wipe it dry, and season the inside and outside with pepper and salt.

Stuff and roast

  1. Place the duck in a roasting pan with 1 cup of hot water and a generous lump of butter.

  2. Mix moistened bread crumbs with butter, salt, pepper, and sage.

  3. Fill the duck with the bread crumb mixture and sew it up.

  4. Cover the duck's breast with thin slices of fat salt pork.

  5. Baste the duck frequently and cook it in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 30 minutes.

  6. Baste the duck frequently until nearly done, ensuring it is a rich brown color and very tender.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Cook the giblets separately.

  2. Chop the giblets finely and add them to the gravy.

  3. After removing the duck, add a teacupful of water to the pan.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour.

  5. Serve the gravy in a sauceboat.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Wild duck
Is the main meat, cooked whole so its fat renders and the skin browns.
Fat salt pork
Lays fat over the breast, basting the meat and helping keep it moist while it roasts.
Moistened bread crumbs
Form a soft stuffing that absorbs the duck's juices and adds body inside the bird.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the pan juices and helps the skin brown.

The step that matters

Baste the duck frequently until nearly done. Wild duck is lean, so regular basting with pan juices keeps the meat moist and helps the skin brown evenly rather than drying out.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Sagethe original
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes