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To Roast Ducks

A recipe for roasting ducks with sage, butter, pepper, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the legs and half of the wings of the ducks.

  2. Stuff the legs with sage, butter, pepper, and salt.

  3. Skewer the legs with small wire skewers.

  4. Boil the tips of the wings, gizzard, and liver for gravy.

Roast

  1. Baste the ducks with butter and dust them with flour.

  2. Roast the ducks until they are a nice light brown.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sage + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,312 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Ducks
Provide the main meat, whose fat renders during roasting to crisp the skin.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the skin brown evenly as it cooks.
Flour
Dusted over the skin to help it brown and form a light crust.
Sage
Adds aromatic herbal flavor that perfumes the meat from inside the legs.

The step that matters

Roast the ducks until they are a nice light brown. Duck skin browns slowly as its fat renders, and the meat can dry out if it roasts too long. Watching the color rather than only the clock helps keep the meat moist while the skin crisps.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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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