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Duck, with Turnips

A duck cooked with turnips, served with a creamy gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 109 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Duck, with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Empty, singe, and truss the duck, tucking its feet behind it.

  2. Make a roux and brown the duck in it.

  3. Stir in the broth and season with pepper, salt, and bay leaf.

  4. Turn the duck until the liquid boils, then add parsley and chives.

Make the turnips

  1. In another pan, fry turnip slices in butter until light brown, then drain.

  2. Boil and mash turnips with pepper, salt, sugar, and cream.

  3. Heat the puree, thicken by evaporation, and spread it on the serving dish.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the turnips to the duck when it is three-quarters cooked and stew until done.

  2. Thicken the gravy with arrowroot or flour, season to taste, and pour over the duck.

  3. Place the browned duck on the puree and surround it with fried turnip slices.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together109 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Provides the main meat, which is browned and then gently stewed until tender.
Butter
Enriches the frying of the turnip slices and adds browning and rich flavour.
Broth
Forms the liquid base of the gravy, adding savoury depth as the duck stews.
Turnips
Provide the bulk of the side, with fried slices for colour and mashed puree for body.
Rich white cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the mashed turnip puree.
Powdered lump-sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the bitterness of the turnips.

The step that matters

Thicken the puree by evaporation. Heating the mashed turnip and cream gently while stirring drives off water so the puree becomes thick enough to hold its shape. Too much heat can scorch the cream, and too little leaves it runny.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, chive, sugar, cream, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, chive, sugar, cream, pepper. 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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