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Boast Wild Duck

Roasted wild duck basted with onion, salt, butter, served with gravy and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boast Wild Duck

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. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

Roast

  1. Baste the wild duck with hot water mixed with the onion and a little coarse sea salt for a few minutes to remove any fishy taste.

  2. Remove the pan and baste the duck with butter.

  3. Roast the duck for 20 to 25 minutes if you prefer it undercooked, or 25 to 35 minutes for well done.

Serve

  1. Serve with a good gravy or orange gravy and a cut lemon.

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. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild duck
Is the main protein, cooked by dry oven heat until it reaches the desired doneness.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches flavour and helps the skin brown as the duck roasts.
Onion
Flavours the basting liquid, adding aroma to the duck while it steams and browns.

The step that matters

Roast the duck for 20 to 25 minutes if you prefer it undercooked, or 25 to 35 minutes for well done.. Wild duck is lean and dries out quickly once overcooked, so the chosen time must match the doneness you want.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter. 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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