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Roast Duck, with Apple Sauce

Roast duck served with apple sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Roast Duck, with Apple Sauce

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.

Prepare the duck

  1. Procure a nice duck.

  2. Clean the duck.

  3. Singe the duck.

  4. Make stuffing with sage, onion, and bread crumbs.

  5. Fill the crop of the duck with stuffing and place the rest inside the body.

  6. Plaster the duck with butter.

  7. Dredge the duck with flour.

Roast and make gravy

  1. Roast the duck at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes per pound plus 20 minutes extra.

  2. Stew the giblets in 1 pint of water to make gravy.

  3. Baste the duck frequently until nearly ready.

  4. Dredge the duck with flour.

  5. Let it brown without basting.

  6. Strain the gravy.

  7. Add a teaspoon of browning and salt.

  8. Remove fat. Boil.

  9. Pour over the duck.

Carve and serve

  1. Carve the duck neatly before serving, placing stuffing between the joints.

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. Sage + walnuttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Duck
Provides the main meat and rendered fat that bastes and crisps the skin as it roasts.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the skin brown evenly during roasting.
Flour
Dusted on the skin to help it brown and crisp, and thickens the gravy.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the stuffing and soak up the juices and fat.
Boiling apples
Break down into a tart, sweet purée that cuts the richness of the duck.
Sugar
Sweetens the apple sauce and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Let it brown without basting.. Basting late in roasting keeps the skin soft, so leaving it alone lets the surface dry and brown. Stopping basting at the right moment decides whether the skin crisps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sage, bread, butter, flour, apple, walnut, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, bread, butter, flour, apple, walnut, sugar. 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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