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To Stew a Wild Duck

A stew of wild duck cooked with sage, sweet herbs, port wine, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Stew a Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Chop sage and sweet herbs finely.

  2. Combine herbs, port wine, lemon juice, pepper, and salt in a pot. Stew for 10 minutes.

Cook the duck

  1. Roast the duck in a Dutch oven until slightly more than half-cooked.

  2. Add the duck and its gravy to the herb stew, allowing the gravy to cool slightly to remove excess fat.

  3. Simmer gently until the duck is fully cooked.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Port wine + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Sage + port winetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together109 recipes

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

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, which becomes tender as it simmers in the stew.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the stew liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich duck flavour.

The step that matters

Cooling the gravy before adding it to the stew. Duck fat is rendered into the roasting gravy and floats on top when it is hot. Letting the gravy cool slightly lets more of that fat be skimmed off, so the stew is less greasy.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, lemon, 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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