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Ragout of Cold Duck or Turkey

A ragout made by simmering cold duck, turkey, or chicken with onion, stock, cayenne pepper, mustard, tomato sauce, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Ragout of Cold Duck or Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Cut up the remains of cold duck, turkey, or chicken.

  2. Make a little stock using the bones.

  3. Flavour the stock with cayenne pepper, mustard, and tomato sauce.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, fry the chopped onion in boiling fat or butter until soft.

  2. Mix the fried onion with the stock and thicken with a little brown flour.

Cook the ragout

  1. Bring the mixture to a boil, then add the pieces of cold duck, turkey, or chicken.

  2. After slightly browning the meat, pour the savory mixture over it.

  3. Let the whole simmer for 15 minutes until thoroughly warm.

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. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Brown flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce that coats the meat.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury depth to the stock.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, building the base flavour of the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the rich meat.

The step that matters

Browning the meat before adding the sauce. Browning creates Maillard flavour compounds on the meat's surface, adding savoury depth that the simmering sauce cannot provide on its own.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turkey, pepper, mustard, sauce, onion, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turkey, pepper, mustard, sauce, onion, butter, flour. 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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