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To Roast Wild Ducks

Roasted wild ducks seasoned with butter, flour, cayenne, lemon, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast Wild Ducks

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 ducks

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Truss the ducks.

  3. Make a few incisions across the breast.

  4. Place a piece of fresh butter on top.

Roast

  1. Place the ducks on a spit over a brisk fire, keeping the spit in rapid motion.

  2. Baste the ducks generously with butter.

  3. Lightly dredge the ducks with flour.

  4. Roast until nicely browned.

Serve

  1. Serve with a good gravy.

  2. Cut the lemon in half.

  3. Sprinkle one half with salt.

  4. Serve the other half plain.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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 ducks
Provide the main meat, which roasts and browns to become the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, basting the skin and promoting browning as it cooks.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, it helps the skin brown and crisp.

The step that matters

Roast until nicely browned. Ducks are lean and can dry out or stay pale if roasted too long without basting. Frequent basting with butter keeps the surface moist while the dry heat drives browning.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

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