Skip to main content
Main

Sauce for Duck or Rabbit

A creamy sauce of butter, cream, onion, parsley, lettuce, gravy, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and red wine, served over duck or rabbit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sauce for Duck or Rabbit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine cream and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Cook over medium heat until thickened.

  3. Add onion, parsley, lettuce, gravy, and the butter-flour mixture to a pot.

  4. Season with lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  5. Stew for 30 minutes.

  6. Stir in red wine and cook for an additional minute.

Serve

  1. Place the duck or rabbit in a serving dish and pour the sauce over it.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Adds richness and body, helping the sauce turn smooth and thick.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter into a paste.
Gravy
Supplies savoury depth and liquid to the sauce.
Red wine
Adds acidity and aroma that deepen the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the butter-flour mixture into the sauce. Flour thickens only when heated enough to swell its starch. Adding it without stirring can leave lumps, and a long simmer helps the starch fully thicken and smooth the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, parsley, lettuce, flour, lemon, pepper):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, parsley, lettuce, flour, lemon, pepper. 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 recipesCreamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes