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To Stew a Wild Duck

A stew of a wild duck cooked with salt, pepper, ketchup, port wine, butter, flour, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Stew a Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Draw and truss the duck as for boiling.

  2. Season the inside with salt and pepper.

  3. Place the duck in a stew pan with a little soup and let it stew for a few minutes.

  4. Remove the duck and make two cuts on each side of the breastbone.

  5. Dredge the cuts with salt and pepper.

Make the sauce and stew

  1. Skim the fat off the sauce and thicken it with butter rolled in flour, ketchup, and port wine.

  2. Return the duck to the pan, breast down, and stew until tender.

  3. Before serving, squeeze in a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Dish the duck and pour the sauce over it; garnish with sliced lemon.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Port wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Ketchup + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Ketchup + port winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 duck
Forms the main body of the stew and provides the meat that becomes tender through slow stewing.
Butter and flour
Form a roux-style paste that thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the sauce as it reduces.
Ketchup
Adds tangy sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty sauce.

The step that matters

Skim the fat off the sauce before thickening. Wild duck carries a lot of fat under the skin and in the cooking liquid. Removing it before thickening keeps the sauce clean-tasting and prevents a greasy, heavy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Red currantfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

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