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Roast Duck

Roast Duck is a whole duck roasted with salt, pepper, flour, and celery and onion stuffing, served with apple sauce or jelly and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 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. If desired, stuff the duck with chopped celery and onion, then truss it.

  2. Sprinkle the duck with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and flour.

Roast

  1. Roast the duck in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes if young and rare.

  2. For full-grown ducks, roast for at least 1 hour, basting every 10 minutes.

  3. Prepare giblet gravy while the duck is roasting.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck with apple sauce or jelly and green peas.

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. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Celery + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

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

  5. Celery + peastop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 fat renders during roasting and keeps the flesh moist.
Flour
Dusted on the skin, it helps the surface dry and brown during roasting.
Celery
Stuffed inside the duck, it adds gentle aromatic flavour to the meat as it roasts.
Onion
Stuffed inside the duck, it adds savoury aroma that perfumes the meat as it roasts.

The step that matters

Roasting time for full-grown ducks. An older bird has tougher meat and needs a longer roast to become tender. Basting every 10 minutes keeps the skin moist and helps it brown evenly, so timing by age matters.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, onion, celery, peas. 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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