Skip to main content
Main

Ducks Aux Truffes, or with Truffles

A dish of ducks stuffed with stewed truffles, parsley, thyme, mushrooms, and bacon, then roasted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Ducks Aux Truffes, or with Truffles

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the ducks

  1. Singe and truss the ducks neatly.

Stuff and wrap

  1. Stew the truffles with chopped parsley, thyme, and mushrooms.

  2. Stuff the mixture inside the ducks.

  3. Wrap the ducks with strips of bacon.

Roast

  1. Roast the ducks at 400°F (200°C) like a fowl with truffles.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

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

  5. Truffle + thymetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Ducks
Form the main body of the dish, cooking into tender meat under the roasting heat.
Truffles
Add a strong, earthy aroma that perfumes the stuffing and the meat.
Mushrooms
Add moisture and savory depth to the stuffing as they stew.
Bacon
Bastes the ducks with rendering fat and adds savory flavor and browning.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (truffle, thyme, mushroom):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Sagefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against truffle, thyme, mushroom. 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes