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To Hash a Duck

A savory hash of duck, onion, 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 sauce

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

  2. Stir in the flour to thicken.

Finish and serve

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

  2. Season with pepper, salt, soy sauce or ketchup, lemon juice, and sugar.

  3. 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

Duck
Provides the main meat and richness that the sauce coats and carries.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the duck rather than running off.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it cooks, adding savoury base flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour to thicken. Flour must be cooked briefly in the hot fat and stirred well before liquid is involved, or it forms lumps and leaves a raw, floury taste. Adding it gradually and stirring keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

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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