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Duck with Turnips

A roasted duck stewed with wine, broth, bacon, onions, herbs, and turnips, finished with a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip 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 ↓

Duck with Turnips

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Singe, draw, and wash the duck inside.

  2. Wipe the duck and truss it with the legs inside.

  3. Fry the duck with chopped bacon and onions over low heat in a stewpan.

  4. Season the duck.

Stew the duck

  1. Moisten the duck with wine and broth to three-quarters full.

  2. Let the liquid boil.

  3. Add the garnished herbs.

  4. Move the stewpan to the side of the heat.

  5. Cover the duck with hot ashes.

  6. Stew the duck for half an hour.

  7. Thicken the stock slightly with a little brown sauce.

Cook the turnips and serve

  1. Blanch the turnips.

  2. Drain the turnips.

  3. Fry the turnips in lard until colored.

  4. Season the turnips with salt, pepper, and sugar.

  5. Add the turnips to the duck when the duck is nearly done.

  6. Continue boiling gently.

  7. Drain the duck.

  8. Remove excess fat from the sauce.

  9. Take out the herbs.

  10. Pour the turnips around the duck.

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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Wine + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,066 recipes

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

  5. Onion + winetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,784 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Duck
Forms the main dish; slow stewing in liquid makes the meat tender and flavors the sauce.
Bacon
Renders fat into the pan, adding savory flavor to the duck and the cooking liquid.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they fry, adding aromatic depth to the sauce.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the cooking liquid, balancing the rich duck fat.
Turnips
Brown in lard for color and a caramelized sweetness, then absorb the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the stew at a gentle simmer. Stewing slowly with the pan moved off direct heat lets connective tissue soften without toughening the meat. Rapid boiling would dry the duck and make the sauce cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

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

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

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