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To Roast a Wild-Duck

Roasted wild duck served with beef gravy, lemon juice, and hot port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast a Wild-Duck

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.

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Baste the duck well with butter and roast for about 45 minutes.

  3. When ready, pour beef gravy through the duck into a serving dish.

  4. Make four cuts along the breast of the duck.

  5. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and cayenne pepper.

  6. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon over the duck.

  7. Pour hot port wine over the duck before serving.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Butter + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Beef + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild duck
Provides the main meat, whose fat renders during roasting to keep it moist.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the skin brown and carries flavour over the surface.
Beef gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth to the serving dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the duck.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth that complements the rich meat.

The step that matters

Make four cuts along the breast of the duck. Scoring the fat layer lets fat render out evenly during roasting, which helps the skin crisp and keeps the meat from becoming greasy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, beef, port wine):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, beef, port wine. 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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