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Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

A dish of duck croquettes served with Bordelaise sauce and a ring of mashed potatoes and green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bordelaise Sauce with Duck Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer duck bones in a saucepan, skimming off the scum for 30 minutes to create a broth.

  2. Strain the broth, let it cool, skim off fat, and thicken with flour and butter.

  3. In a small saucepan, combine Sauternes, minced onion, black pepper, and salt; boil until reduced by half.

  4. Strain the reduced liquid into the thickened broth and simmer for 10 minutes.

Make and fry the croquettes

  1. For croquettes, mix minced bacon, duck liver, truffle or mushroom trimmings, and dried sage leaves; season with salt and pepper.

  2. Bind the mixture with egg, form into egg‑shaped balls, and coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the croquettes in hot fat until pale golden yellow.

Serve

  1. Serve croquettes around a ring of mashed potatoes, filling the center with petits pois verts, and pour hot Bordelaise sauce over.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Olive + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,138 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck bones
Simmered to make the broth that forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooled broth with butter to give the sauce body.
Egg
Binds the croquette mixture so it holds its shape when fried.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns when the croquettes are fried.
Duck liver
Adds rich, savoury flavour and a soft texture to the croquette filling.
Minced bacon (lean and fat)
Adds savoury flavour and fat that keeps the filling moist.

The step that matters

Frying the croquettes in hot fat. The fat must be hot enough to brown the bread crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs grease and the croquettes turn soggy and can fall apart before the filling is heated through.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, liver, truffle, olive, sage):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, liver, truffle, olive, sage. 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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