Skip to main content
Main

Ducks with Anchovies

A roasted duck served with a sauce of anchovy, bacon, and liver.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wine and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Ducks with Anchovies

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the duck

  1. Fry the duck liver with bacon in butter until well cooked, then remove the liver from the pan.

  2. Moisten the duck with stock and wine, add spices, and let it stew slowly for 2 to 3 hours.

  3. Add lemon slices to the duck.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Pound the liver with anchovies and butter until well mixed.

  2. Add the liver mixture to the sauce.

  3. Warm the sauce for about 10 minutes before serving.

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. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

  4. Liver + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Liver + winetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together251 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

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, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Duck liver
Adds richness and body to the sauce when pounded smooth with the other ingredients.
Anchovies
Contribute a salty, savory depth that rounds out the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness for frying the liver and blending the sauce.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savory fat to the pan in which the liver is fried.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stewing the duck slowly. Long, gentle simmering in liquid breaks down connective tissue so the meat becomes tender. Too much heat can toughen the meat and dry out the sauce, so keep the liquid at a low simmer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, butter, wine. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes