Skip to main content
Main

Dressed Ducks, or Geese Hashed

A hash of duck pieces simmered in a butter‑onion sauce with flour, seasoned with pepper, salt, and ketchup, served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Dressed Ducks, or Geese Hashed

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew-pan, melt the butter and add the diced onion. Fry until soft but not browned.

  2. Add enough boiling water to create a sauce and thicken with flour.

  3. Add the duck pieces to the sauce to warm them, ensuring it does not boil.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and ketchup.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck on a bed of sippets of fried or toasted bread.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Cooked duck
Forms the main body of the dish and is warmed gently in the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water into a smooth sauce that coats the duck.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries its flavour into the sauce.
Onion
Softened in butter to add sweetness and savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Warm the duck without boiling. Boiling a sauce containing cooked meat toughens the proteins and can cause the flour-thickened sauce to break or become grainy. Gentle heat keeps the duck tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, flour, pepper, ketchup, bread. 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.

More duck hash recipes

Wild 6 See all 26 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes