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Roast Wild Ducks with Bistarade Sauce

Roasted wild ducks served with a sauce of butter, flour, stock, orange rind, orange juice, sugar, marsala, and chili vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Roast Wild Ducks with Bistarade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roast the wild ducks.

  2. Pare the rind of the oranges thinly, cut into shreds, blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain, and set aside.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, and add the stock, pepper, salt, orange juice, sugar, marsala, and chili vinegar.

  2. Add the boiled rinds, stir until the sauce boils, and serve in a boat.

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. Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 ducks
Provide the main meat, which is cooked by roasting.
Oranges
Supply juice and rind that add acidity and bright citrus aroma to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce and carries flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock and butter into a smooth sauce.
Marsala
Adds wine-based sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until it boils after adding the flour and stock. Flour must be cooked in hot butter and liquid to thicken fully and lose its raw taste. Stirring keeps it smooth and prevents lumps from forming as the starch swells.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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