Skip to main content
Main

Wild Ducks, with Orange Salad

Roasted wild ducks served with a salad of orange segments, chives, chervil, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chive and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 370 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wild Ducks, with Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the ducks

  1. Roast the wild ducks carefully.

  2. Score the breast of each duck and let the gravy run out.

  3. Add burgundy, lemon juice, and Tabasco or chili vinegar to the gravy.

  4. Stir the gravy and baste the duck breasts liberally.

  5. Carve the ducks when ready.

Make the orange salad

  1. Peel the oranges and divide them into quarters, removing the seeds.

  2. Place the orange pieces in a salad bowl and dress with chives and chervil or cress.

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. Chive + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together370 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + cherviltop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + chivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Orange + cherviltop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together46 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

Wild ducks
Provide the main meat, whose fat renders out during roasting and scoring.
Burgundy or claret
Adds acidity and wine flavour to the gravy that is basted over the breasts.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty gravy.
Oranges
Provide sweet-sharp juice and fresh flavour that cut through the rich duck.

The step that matters

Scoring the duck breast. Cutting through the skin and fat lets the fat render out of the breast, so the skin crisps and the gravy runs clear of excess grease. Shallow, even cuts help this without piercing the meat too deeply.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, vinegar, chive, chervil):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, vinegar, chive, chervil. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes