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Modern Cookery

A roasted duck stewed with green peas, turnips, green onions, parsley, young carrots, and optional Espagnole sauce or beef stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

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.

Roast and stew

  1. Truss the duck firmly and roast it halfway in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  2. In a stewpan, add the duck and cover it with boiling gravy.

  3. Stew the duck for 1 to 1.25 hours, turning it occasionally.

  4. In the last 15 minutes, add green peas or turnips, green onions, parsley, and young carrots to the stewpan.

Finish

  1. For added flavor, sauté minced eschalots in butter and add to the stew.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Peas + carrottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow stewing in gravy.
Green peas
Add sweetness and fresh texture against the rich, long-cooked duck.
Young carrots
Add natural sweetness and a tender bite to the stew.
Eschalots
Add a mild, savoury aroma when sautéed in butter before going into the stew.
Butter
Carries the eschalots' flavour and adds richness when they are sautéed.

The step that matters

Stewing the duck for 1 to 1.25 hours. Stewing at a gentle simmer, turning the duck occasionally, lets the tough connective tissue soften so the meat becomes tender. Too fast a boil can toughen the meat and leave it dry.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, parsley, carrot, butter, sauce, beef):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, parsley, carrot, butter, sauce, beef. 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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