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Hashed Duck

A dish of cooked duck pieces simmered in a sauce of butter, flour, gravy, duck stuffing, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Hashed Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Add the gravy and bring to a simmer.

  4. Mix in the duck stuffing, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

Finish the dish

  1. Add the duck pieces and warm them in the sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps the flour cook.
Gravy
Provides the liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Duck stuffing
Adds savoury flavour and body to the sauce.
Cooked duck
Forms the main ingredient, warmed through in the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in the butter before adding the gravy. Cooking the flour in melted butter for a minute toasts out its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding gravy too early can leave lumps and a floury flavour.

“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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