Name: Wild Ducks
Ingredients: 1 duck; ½ cup good gravy; ⅓ cup red wine; 1 onion, sliced thin; 1 teaspoon caper-liquor (optional); 1 teaspoon browning (optional)

Why it works: Red wine and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,075 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Wild Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

Cut up the duck in the usual manner.
Place the duck in a pan with gravy, red wine, and sliced onion.
Boil for 2-3 minutes.

Serve

Transfer the duck to a dish and pour the gravy over it.
Add caper-liquor or browning if desired.

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.

Red wine + oniontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,075 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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, which is cooked directly in the gravy and wine.
Gravy: Adds moisture and savoury body that coats the duck and forms the sauce.
Red wine: Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Onion: Adds sweetness and aroma as it softens in the liquid.

“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.