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Mock Duck

A stuffed beef slice cooked in drippings or butter, finished with a sauce made from hot water and stuffing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and turkey work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 248 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Mock Duck

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the slice of beef thin.

  2. Prepare a stuffing as you would for a turkey.

  3. Fill the beef slice with the stuffing.

  4. Sew the stuffed slice up.

Cook

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper when first placed in the pan.

  2. Fry the stuffed beef in drippings or butter for 1 hour, turning it and keeping it covered until cooked through.

  3. After removing from heat, pour in hot water and add any stuffing that falls out to thicken the sauce.

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. Beef + turkeytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together248 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Turkey + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,636 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that is rolled around the stuffing and cooked until tender.
Stuffing
Fills the beef and, when loosened into the liquid, helps thicken the sauce.
Drippings or butter
Fat for frying the stuffed beef, adding richness and browning the surface.

The step that matters

Keeping the beef covered while frying. Covering traps steam so the meat cooks through gently for the full hour, keeping it moist while the outside browns.

“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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