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Duck with Turnips

A roasted duck simmered with broth, herbs, and turnips, finished with a creamy gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Duck with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Remove the insides, singe, and truss the duck with its feet tucked behind it.

  2. Make a roux in a pan and brown the duck in it.

  3. Stir in the broth and season with salt, pepper, and bay leaf.

  4. Turn the duck until the liquid boils, then add parsley and chives.

Cook the turnips

  1. In another pan, fry sliced turnips in butter until light brown, then drain.

  2. Add the turnips to the duck when it is three-quarters cooked.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew slowly until the duck is fully cooked.

  2. Thicken the gravy with arrowroot or flour, season to taste, and boil.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck surrounded by the turnips.

  2. For a fancier presentation, boil turnips until tender, then mash with pepper, salt, sugar, and cream.

  3. Heat the puree, thicken by evaporation, and spread it on the serving dish.

  4. Place the browned duck on top and arrange the fried turnip slices around it.

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. Turnip + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 is slowly stewed until fully cooked and tender.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the sliced turnips brown lightly in the pan.
Broth
Forms the cooking liquid that the duck stews in and becomes the gravy.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and a tender texture when fried or mashed.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the mashed turnip puree.
Arrowroot or flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the duck and turnips.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with arrowroot or flour, then boil. Starch granules swell and gelatinise only when heated to a boil, so the gravy thickens properly only if it is brought fully to the boil after the thickener is added.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, chive, turnip, sugar, cream):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, chive, turnip, sugar, cream. 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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