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Salmis of Wild Duck

A sauce made from duck trimmings, red wine, shallots, butter, salt, and pepper, served over roasted wild duck.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,898 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Salmis of Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Roast and joint

  1. Roast the wild duck over a brisk fire for about 25 minutes to retain its juices.

  2. Place the duck breast-side down in a dish to cool.

  3. Cut the duck into small joints: two fillets, two legs, and the breast and back into two pieces each.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the trimmings with ½ pint of red wine and 4 chopped shallots.

  2. Simmer the mixture until reduced, then strain it over the duck pieces.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and butter to the stewpan, warming gently without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve the duck with croutons.

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. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

  2. Red wine + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Red wine + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Shallot + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild duck
Provides the meat for the dish, and its juices are kept by a brisk roast.
Red wine
Reduces with the trimmings and shallots to build the flavour of the sauce.
Shallots
Soften and sweeten as they simmer with the wine, adding depth to the sauce.
Butter
Added at the end to enrich the sauce and give it a smooth, glossy texture.

The step that matters

Warming the sauce without boiling. Once butter is added, boiling can split the emulsion, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, pepper, butter. 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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