Skip to main content
Main

Duck , Roast

A roasted duck stuffed with a savory mixture, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper, served with lemon and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Duck , Roast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean and truss the duck as instructed in Recipe No. 273 for Chicken.

  2. Stuff the duck with the stuffing.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the duck in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve with good brown gravy.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + port winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Lemon + port winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Its fat renders during roasting, crisping the skin and flavoring the meat.
Stuffing
Fills the cavity and adds flavor and moisture as the bird cooks.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Red currantfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, port wine. 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.

More roasted duck recipes

You might also like