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Boiled Ducks and Onion Sauce

A dish of boiled ducks served with a sauce of onions, flour, butter, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Ducks and Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil the ducks

  1. Prepare the ducks by drawing the legs as you would for boiling.

  2. Boil the ducks for about 20 minutes.

  3. While the ducks are boiling, chop the onions finely.

Make the onion sauce

  1. In a stew pan, mix the chopped onions with the flour.

  2. Add the butter and cream to the onion mixture.

  3. Heat the mixture on the stove, stirring until it boils for about 2 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the ducks on a dish and pour the sauce over them.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which is cooked by boiling until tender.
Onions
Provide the bulk and savory sweetness of the sauce as they soften with heat.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the ducks rather than running off.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Cream
Adds body and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce until it boils. Flour thickens only when the mixture reaches a boil, so the sauce must be heated long enough and stirred constantly to prevent lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

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