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Salmi De Canard

A hearty duck stew made with giblets, onions, herbs, and a wine-lemon sauce thickened with corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Salmi De Canard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the giblets and hot water for the sauce.

  2. Add the chopped onions, parsley, cloves, sage, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and simmer for about 1 hour until well flavored.

Stew and finish

  1. Add the duck pieces and stew slowly for 2 hours, adding more boiling water if necessary.

  2. Just before finishing, stir in the port wine and lemon juice.

  3. Blend the corn starch with a little cold water and stir it into the sauce.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  3. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Duck
Slow stewing turns the meat tender and gives the sauce its rich base flavor.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce, rounding out the savory flavors.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Onions
Release sugars as they cook, adding sweetness and savory depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn starch. Corn starch must be blended with cold water first, because dry starch clumps when added to hot liquid. Stirring it into the simmering sauce then lets the starch swell and thicken it evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, parsley, clove, sage, pepper, port wine, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, parsley, clove, sage, pepper, port wine, lemon. 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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