Skip to main content
Main

Roast Wild Ducks with Bigarade Sauce

Roasted wild ducks served with a sauce of orange peel, stock, butter, flour, and Marsala.

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

Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,491 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Wild Ducks with Bigarade Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Pare the orange peels as thin as possible, cut into thin shreds, and boil in water for 5 minutes.

  2. Drain the peels and set aside.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then stir in the flour.

  2. Add the common stock, pepper, salt, orange juice, sugar, Marsala, and chili vinegar.

  3. Stir in the boiled orange peels and cook until the sauce boils.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the wild ducks until cooked through.

  2. Serve the sauce in a boat alongside the roasted ducks.

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 + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

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

  2. Orange + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together937 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Pepper + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Wild ducks
Provide the main roasted meat, which is cooked through before serving.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor as the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Orange juice
Adds bright acidity and sweetness that balances the rich duck.
Orange peel
Adds bitter aroma and a chewy texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the melted butter before adding liquid. Cooking flour in fat, a roux, lets starch granules coat evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly, while adding liquid too early can leave lumps.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, sugar, vinegar, lime):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, sugar, vinegar, lime. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes