Skip to main content
Main

Salmi De Canard

A duck stew simmered with onions, herbs, and a sauce thickened with corn starch, served with optional peas or olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Salmi De Canard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine giblets and enough hot water in a saucepan.

  2. Add chopped onions, parsley, cloves, sage, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover and simmer for about 1 hour until well flavored.

  4. Add duck pieces and stew slowly for 2 hours, adding more boiling water if necessary.

  5. Stir in port wine and lemon juice just before finishing.

  6. Blend corn starch with a little cold water and stir into boiling sauce; boil for 2 minutes.

Serve

  1. Arrange duck on a hot dish.

  2. Pour gravy over it.

  3. Garnish with croutons or serve with a rice border.

  4. Optionally add boiled green peas or stoned olives 10-15 minutes 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + sagetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,445 recipes

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

  3. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold duck
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Giblets
Build a rich, savory base for the stock that becomes the gravy.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavor to the gravy.
Corn-starch
Thickens the boiling sauce so it coats the duck as a gravy.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic flavor to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn starch slurry. Cornstarch must be blended with cold water first and then added to boiling liquid, so the granules disperse evenly instead of clumping. Boiling then fully activates the starch so the gravy thickens properly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, parsley, clove, sage, pepper, port wine, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, parsley, clove, sage, pepper, port wine, 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.

More duck stew recipes

Wild 21with Green Peas 8with Red Cabbage 4with Peas 3 See all 58 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipes