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Ducks A-LA-mode

A duck dish stewed in gravy, red wine, anchovy, shallots, and herbs, finished with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Ducks A-LA-mode

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the duck

  1. Cut the ducks into quarters and fry them in butter until light brown.

  2. Pour out the fat, dust the ducks with flour, and add gravy, red wine, anchovy, shallots, and herbs.

Stew and thicken

  1. Cover and stew for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the herbs, skim off the fat, and thicken the sauce with butter rolled in flour.

Serve

  1. Place the ducks in a dish, strain the sauce over them, and serve.

  2. Garnish with lemon or barberries.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Red wine + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, which is browned first and then gently braised until tender.
Flour
Dusted on the browned duck and later used with butter to thicken the sauce.
Butter
Browns the duck for colour and flavour, and thickens the sauce when rolled in flour.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the sauce as it stews with the duck.
Gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving body and savoury flavour.
Anchovy
Adds a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the duck. Frying the duck until light brown builds colour and flavour through the Maillard reaction, which later carries into the sauce. Pale duck gives a flat, washed-out result.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, red wine, anchovy, shallot):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Red currantfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red wine, anchovy, shallot. 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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