Skip to main content
Main

Roast Wild Duck

A roasted wild duck stuffed with onion and bread, seasoned with salt, pepper, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. 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. Boil the duck with 1 onion for about 1 hour to reduce the wild taste. Let it cool.

  2. Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan and sauté the finely chopped onion until soft.

  3. Add the moistened bread to the onion, season with salt and pepper, and mix well.

  4. Stuff the duck with the dressing.

Roast

  1. Place the duck in a roasting pan, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and flour, and add 2 tablespoons of butter and some water.

  2. Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven until the duck is light brown.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 duck
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that is cooked and served.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the skin brown in the oven.
Dry bread
Absorbs moisture and liquid from the onion, giving the stuffing a soft, binding texture.
Onion
Adds aroma and sweetness once softened in butter, flavouring the dressing.
Flour
Sprinkled on the bird to help the surface brown and form a light crust.

The step that matters

Boiling the duck before roasting. Boiling for about an hour reduces the strong wild taste of the bird. Cooling it before stuffing and roasting keeps handling safe and makes the bird easier to work with.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes