Name: Wild Duck
Ingredients: brown sauce; ⅓ cup wine; 2 tablespoons orange juice; 2 tablespoons lemon juice; 1 pinch sugar; salt to taste; pepper to taste; watercress for garnish; lemon quarters for garnish

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brown sauce as directed.
Add the wine, orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, salt, and pepper to the sauce.
Simmer for 15 minutes.
Strain and skim the sauce.
Serve the sauce with the wild duck on a hot dish, garnished with watercress and lemon quarters.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Orange + watercresstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together983 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, wine, lemon, sugar, pepper, watercress):

Limefits better
Orangethe original
Avocadofits less well
Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, wine, lemon, sugar, pepper, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.