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Duck, Salmi of

A stuffed duck cooked with chestnuts, Spanish onion, vegetables, and seasoned with red currant jelly and Espagnole sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Duck, Salmi of

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Boil the chestnuts and remove the skins.

  2. Cook the Spanish onion in stock or water until tender, then chop both finely.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, add the egg yolks, and use this mixture to stuff the duck.

Prepare the duck

  1. Truss the duck and lard it neatly.

  2. In a large stewpan, melt the butter and add the sliced vegetables.

  3. Place the duck on top, cover, and fry gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Add enough stock to cover the vegetables, adding more as it boils away.

  5. Cover the duck with a buttered paper, put on the lid, and cook gently for about 2 hours, or until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat the Espagnole sauce, add the wine and jelly, and season to taste.

  2. Remove the trussing strings and place the duck in a hot oven for a few minutes to crisp the bacon.

  3. Serve with a small quantity of sauce poured over and the remainder in a sauceboat.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chestnut + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Egg yolks
Bind the chestnut and onion stuffing so it holds together when cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and helps brown the vegetables at the start of cooking.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a tart fruit note that balances the rich duck sauce.
Chestnuts
Give the stuffing a starchy, soft texture and a mild, nutty flavour.
Larding bacon
Adds fat that bastes the duck and crisps the surface when finished in the oven.

The step that matters

Cook the duck gently under a lid. Slow, covered cooking with added stock keeps the meat moist and tender; boiling hard would toughen the meat and dry out the stock-based cooking liquid.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, chestnut, butter, egg, carrot, turnip, celery):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, chestnut, butter, egg, carrot, turnip, celery. 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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