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Dressed Ducks, or Geese Hashed

A hash of diced onion, butter, flour, and duck or goose pieces simmered in a sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a stew-pan and fry the diced onion until it does not color.

  2. Add enough boiling water to make a sauce for the hash.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour.

Finish

  1. Add the duck pieces to the sauce to warm them without boiling.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, and ketchup.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 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
Provides the main protein and flavor of the hash.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the duck and onion.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens in the butter.
Butter
Carries the onion and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Warming the duck without boiling. Boiling toughens cooked meat and can make it dry and stringy, so the duck should only be heated gently in the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

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