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Wild Duck, Teal, and Widgeon

Roasted wild duck, teal, or widgeon served with watercress, lemon, and Bigarade sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wild Duck, Teal, and Widgeon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, singe, and truss the birds for roasting.

  2. Brush the birds with melted butter.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast before a quick fire for 20 to 30 minutes, basting well.

  2. Serve with watercress and lemon.

  3. Hand Bigarade sauce.

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. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  4. Watercress + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together295 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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
Provides the rich meat that the quick roasting cooks through while keeping it tender.
Melted butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the skin brown and crisp in the oven.

The step that matters

Roasting before a quick fire while basting well. Wild duck is lean and can dry out quickly. Frequent basting with the fat in the pan keeps the meat moist and helps the skin brown evenly without overcooking the interior.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, watercress, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, watercress, sauce. 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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