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Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

Duck croquettes served with Bordelaise sauce, mashed potatoes, and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the duck bones in a saucepan, skimming off any scum for 30 minutes to create a flavorful broth.

  2. Strain the broth, let it cool, skim off the fat, and thicken it with flour and butter.

  3. In a small saucepan, combine sauterne, minced onion, black pepper, and salt. Boil until reduced by half.

  4. Strain the reduced liquid into the thickened broth and simmer for 10 minutes.

Make and fry the croquettes

  1. For the croquettes, mix minced bacon, duck liver, and truffle or mushroom trimmings. Season with pepper and salt.

  2. Add ½ teaspoon of dried sage powder to the mixture and bind with an egg.

  3. Form the mixture into egg-shaped balls, coat with bread crumbs, and fry in hot fat until golden yellow.

Serve

  1. Serve the croquettes arranged around a ring of mashed potatoes, topped with a pyramid of petits pois verts, and pour the hot Bordelaise sauce over them.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Olive + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,138 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Duck bones
Build the broth that forms the base of the Bordelaise sauce.
Flour
Thickens the broth so the sauce coats the croquettes.
Butter
Enriches the thickened sauce with fat and smooth body.
Duck liver
Adds rich, soft texture and savoury depth to the croquette filling.
Egg
Binds the croquette mixture so it holds its shape when fried.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp golden coating during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the croquettes. The mixture is soft and only held together by the egg, so it can fall apart or stay pale if the fat is not hot enough. Hot fat quickly sets the coating and browns it, sealing the filling inside.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, liver, truffle, olive, sage):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, liver, truffle, olive, sage. 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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