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A Duck with Green Peas

A duck cooked with green peas, gravy, lettuce, herbs, spices, and a sauce thickened with butter or egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

A Duck with Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Singe the duck and coat it with flour.

  2. Heat a pan and turn the duck for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Pour out excess fat, leaving the duck in the pan.

Stew

  1. Add gravy, peas, lettuces, sweet herbs, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover and stew for 30 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

  3. When done, add nutmeg and mace.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken with butter rolled in flour or egg yolk mixed with cream.

  2. Shake for 3-4 minutes, remove sweet herbs, and serve the duck with 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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lettuce + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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, whose rendered fat is poured off before stewing.
Flour
Coats the duck and, with butter, thickens the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness when rolled in flour to thicken it.
Gravy
Forms the cooking liquid that the duck and vegetables stew in.
Peas
Add sweetness and body to the stewed sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce and adds richness when mixed with cream.

The step that matters

Thicken with butter rolled in flour or egg yolk mixed with cream. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently because its proteins set; if the sauce boils hard after adding it, the yolk can curdle and turn grainy. Keep the heat low and shake the pan rather than stirring vigorously.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, peas, lettuce, pepper, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, peas, lettuce, pepper, nutmeg, egg. 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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