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To Hash a Duck

A savory hash of duck with onions, butter, flour, and seasonings, served with toasted crackers or bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Hash a Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hash

  1. Fry the chopped onion in a stew pan with the butter.

  2. Thicken the mixture with flour.

  3. Add the cut-up duck to the sauce to warm it through.

  4. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, soy sauce or ketchup, lemon juice, and sugar.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish with toasted crackers or bread.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sauce + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Onion
Softens in butter and adds savory sweetness to the base.
Butter
Carries the onion and adds richness and flavor to the base.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a sauce that clings to the duck.
Duck
Provides the main meat and rich, fatty flavor.
Soy sauce or ketchup
Adds salty, savory depth and a touch of sweetness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour must be cooked into the fat and liquid so it swells and sets the sauce smoothly. Added raw or in clumps, it leaves lumps and a pasty taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

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