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Ducks a LA Daube

A slow‑cooked duck dish with stock, herbs, bacon, and claret.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Ducks a LA Daube

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ducks

  1. Preheat your stove.

  2. Fill the larded ducks with the minced shallots.

Stew

  1. Place the ducks in a pot with a little stock for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the good stock, bones, giblets, onions, cloves, herbs, cayenne, salt, lemon juice, mace, and claret.

  3. Cover the ducks with bacon sheets and stew slowly for 2 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the ducks, strain and skim the liquid, then pour it over the ducks before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Ducks
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow stewing.
Bacon
Lays fat over the ducks as they stew, adding savoury richness and moisture.
Claret
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the braising liquid.
Onions
Break down during stewing, adding sweetness and body to the sauce.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet aromatic flavour that sits within the duck.

The step that matters

Slow stewing for 2 hours. Keeping the heat low and the pot covered lets the tough duck meat and connective tissue break down gradually. Boiling hard would toughen the meat and reduce the liquid too quickly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, onion, clove, pepper, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, onion, clove, pepper, lemon. 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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