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Roast Duck

Roast Duck with onions, sage, butter, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, and optional apple.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stuffing

  1. Slice the onions.

  2. Blanch the sliced onions with the sage leaves for 5 minutes.

  3. Drain and chop the onions finely.

  4. Combine the onions, sage, butter, salt, and pepper in a stewpan.

  5. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  6. Add the bread crumbs and stir for 2 minutes.

Roast the duck

  1. Truss the duck.

  2. Roast the duck before a brisk fire, basting occasionally.

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

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  5. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften into a sweet, moist base for the stuffing once blanched and simmered.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries the sage flavour and keeps the stuffing moist.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the cooking juices and bind the stuffing into a cohesive mixture.
Sage leaves
Contribute the herbal aroma that defines the stuffing's flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer the onion mixture gently. Gentle simmering softens the onions and drives off excess liquid without scorching the butter. Stirring occasionally keeps the mixture from sticking and burning on the base of the stewpan, which would make the stuffing taste bitter.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, sage, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, sage, butter, pepper, bread. 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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