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Roast Duck

Roast Duck is a dish of a young duck roasted and served with currant jelly, apple sauce, green peas, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sage work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. 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. Dress and stuff the duck as desired.

  2. If using an old duck, parboil it before roasting.

Roast

  1. Roast the young duck at 400°F (200°C) for 25 to 30 minutes, basting frequently.

  2. For a full-grown duck, roast for 1 hour or more, ensuring thorough cooking.

Serve and use leftovers

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

  2. For leftovers, place the remains in a stew-pan with 1 pint of gravy and a little sage. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, then add 1 pint of boiled green peas and stew for a few minutes.

  3. Transfer to a dish and pour the gravy and peas over it.

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. Apple + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

  2. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Apple + peastop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together192 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Peas + sagetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

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

  5. Currant + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Duck
Is the main protein, cooked by roasting until the meat is done and the skin browns.
Gravy
Adds moisture and savory flavor to the leftover duck during the stew.
Green peas
Add color, sweetness, and a soft texture to the leftover stew.

The step that matters

Roasting a full-grown duck. An older duck has tougher meat and more fat, so it needs longer, thorough roasting to become tender and fully cooked. Parboiling first, as the record advises for old birds, helps soften the meat and render fat before roasting.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sauce, peas, sage):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sauce, peas, sage. 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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