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Roast the Wild Ducks

Roasted wild ducks served with a sauce of butter, flour, stock, orange juice, sugar, chili vinegar, and orange rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,402 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Roast the Wild Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Roast the wild ducks until cooked through.

  2. Pare the rind of the oranges as thin as possible and boil in water for 5 minutes.

Make the sauce

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

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

  3. Stir in the boiled rinds and bring the sauce to a boil.

Serve

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 meat, cooked through by roasting.
Butter
Melts with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with melted butter.
Orange juice
Adds bright acidity and sweetness that balance the rich duck.
Orange rind
Contributes aromatic oils and a bitter citrus flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the boiled rinds and bring the sauce to a boil. Rind must be pared thin and boiled first so its bitterness is mellowed and the shreds stay tender. Boiling the finished sauce thickens the flour mixture fully, so it reaches a smooth consistency without lumps.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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