Skip to main content
Main

Roast Wild Duck

Roast Wild Duck is a whole duck roasted with salt, pepper, flour, butter, and water, served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. 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

  1. Clean the duck as you would a turkey, wiping both inside and out with a damp towel.

  2. Tuck back the wings and truss the legs close to the body.

  3. Dust the duck with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and flour.

  4. Place a piece of butter inside the duck and put it in a baking pan.

  5. Add 1 cup of water to the pan.

Roast and finish

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes if you prefer it rare, or 45 minutes to 1 hour for well done, basting frequently with the pan gravy.

  2. When done, thicken the gravy.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

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

  4. Butter + walnuttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 protein, cooked whole so its meat stays moist under dry roasting heat.
Flour
Coats the skin and helps form a browned, slightly thickened gravy in the pan.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the flavor and moisture of the meat as it melts during roasting.

The step that matters

Choosing the baking time for doneness. Wild duck is lean and dries out quickly past the target doneness, so the difference between rare and well done is only a matter of minutes. Checking early and basting frequently keeps the meat juicy.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes