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Braised Duck, with Turnips

A braised duck served with turnips in a sauce of butter, flour, stock, Marsala wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Braised Duck, with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the duck

  1. Sift the sugar over the peeled turnips.

  2. Melt 4 ounces of butter in a stewpan and fry the turnips until pale brown.

  3. Add 2 ounces more butter and the chopped onion.

  4. Place the duck breast down in the pan and brown for 20 minutes.

  5. Remove the duck and stir in the baked flour, soy sauce, salt, pepper, and stock.

  6. Boil the mixture, skimming off the fat.

  7. Add the Marsala wine and strained lemon juice.

  8. Return the duck to the pan, breast up, and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  9. Add the turnips and continue to simmer for another 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck on a hot dish with turnips around it and pour the gravy over.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Duck
Provides the rich meat and fat that flavour the braising liquid.
Turnips
Caramelised in butter and sugar, they gain browning and a mildly sweet flavour.
Butter
Carries heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the turnips and onion.
Baked flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy as its starch swells with heat.
Marsala wine
Adds aroma and sweetness, and its acidity balances the rich fat of the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its sweetness.

The step that matters

Skimming the fat after boiling. Duck releases a lot of fat as it cooks. Leaving it on the surface makes the gravy greasy and heavy, so it must be skimmed off before the wine and lemon are added.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, sugar, butter, flour, sauce, pepper, wine. 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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