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Roast Wild Duck

Roast Wild Duck is a dish of a trussed wild duck roasted with bacon, served on watercress with port wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and sauce work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 295 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Roast Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare and truss the wild duck.

  2. Tie the slice of fat bacon over the breast.

Roast

  1. Roast the duck in front of a brisk fire for 20 minutes.

  2. After 10 minutes, remove the bacon, baste well, and dredge the bird with flour.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, arrange a bed of watercress on a hot dish, remove the strings, and place the duck on the cress.

  2. Serve port wine sauce in a sauceboat.

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. Watercress + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together295 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Port wine + saucetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Watercress + port winetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild duck
Forms the main body of the dish, with lean meat that cooks quickly at high heat.
Fat bacon
Bastes the breast with melting fat, keeping the lean meat moist and adding savoury flavour.
Flour (in the method)
Dredged over the bird to help form a lightly browned, crisp outer surface.

The step that matters

Removing the bacon and basting at 10 minutes. Wild duck is very lean, so it can dry out quickly. Basting with the rendered fat keeps the surface moist while the bacon is taken off to let the breast brown.

“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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