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Roast Wild Duck

Roasted wild ducks served with gravy and lemon quarters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Roast Wild Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the ducks by cleaning them as directed in receipt No. 99.

  2. Do not stuff the ducks; tie the slices of pork or bacon over the breasts.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the ducks for 15 minutes per pound.

  2. Serve with gravy in a boat and lemon quarters on the same dish.

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. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  3. Pork + lemontop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,786 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Wild ducks
The main meat, lean and firm, cooked whole.
Pork or bacon
Fat that bastes the lean breast meat, helping it stay moist and flavourful while roasting.

The step that matters

Roasting by weight. Wild duck is very lean, so it dries out quickly if overcooked. Timing by weight, rather than by appearance, helps keep the meat juicy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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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