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Roast Wild Duck

Roast Wild Duck stuffed with bacon, butter, onion, parsley, and duck liver, served with orange sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Roast Wild Duck

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Mince the duck livers with scraped bacon, butter, onion, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  2. Fill the bodies of the ducks with the mixture and cover with bacon slices.

Roast and serve

  1. Wrap the ducks in paper and place in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a stew pan, combine gravy, orange juice, shallots, butter, salt, and pepper.

  3. Once the ducks are brown, dish them and pour the sauce over them.

  4. Serve with slices of orange.

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. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Onion + shallottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,431 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild ducks
Provide the main meat, which the stuffing and paper wrap keep moist as it roasts.
Duck livers
Minced into the stuffing, they add richness and a deep, savoury flavour.
Bacon
Lends fat and smoky savour to the stuffing and lays over the birds to baste them.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the stuffing and sauce taste rounded.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and fruity brightness that cuts through the rich duck fat.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, butter, onion, parsley, pepper, shallot):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, butter, onion, parsley, pepper, shallot. 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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