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Wild Duck with Olives

A stew of wild duck cooked with olives, flour, soup, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Wild Duck with Olives

Ingredients

Directions

Brown and make the sauce

  1. In a stew-pan, brown the duck.

  2. Add flour and continue browning.

  3. Stir in soup.

Prepare the olives

  1. Peel and remove the kernels from the olives.

  2. Scald the olives in just enough boiling water to cover them.

Finish and serve

  1. When the duck is almost cooked, add the olives to the pan.

  2. Once done, place the duck in the center of a dish, surround it with olives, and pour the sauce over everything.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

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

  3. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild duck
Provides the main meat, whose browned fat and juices flavor the whole dish.
Flour
Browns with the duck fat and thickens the soup into a sauce.
Soup
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding moisture and savory flavor as it simmers.
Pickled olives
Add salty, tangy flavor that contrasts with the rich duck and sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fattiness.

The step that matters

Browning the duck. Searing the duck until deeply browned builds the Maillard flavors and color that the sauce depends on. Pale meat gives a flat, dull sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, olive, 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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