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Roasted Ducks

Roasted Ducks is a dish of ducks roasted with a breadcrumb and butter dressing, served with gravy and optional fruit sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage 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 ↓

Roasted Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and truss the ducks like chickens.

  2. In a bowl, mix bread crumbs, butter, grated onion, salt, and pepper to make the dressing.

  3. Season the ducks inside and out with salt, pepper, and sage.

Roast

  1. Place the ducks in a roasting pan with a little water and add bits of drippings on top.

  2. Baste the ducks often as they cook.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Stew the giblets for the gravy.

  2. Chop the giblets and pour off most of the fat from the pan.

  3. Thicken the gravy with flour and season well.

  4. Serve with stewed cranberries or apple 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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ducks
Provide the main meat, whose fat renders and bastes the bird as it roasts.
Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the dressing, soaking up butter and onion juices to give a moist, soft stuffing.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the dressing, carrying flavour and keeping the crumbs moist.
Flour
Thickens the pan drippings into a smooth gravy as it cooks with the liquid.

The step that matters

Pour off most of the fat from the pan. Duck releases a large amount of fat while roasting. Leaving too much in the pan makes the gravy greasy and can stop the flour from thickening it properly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, sage, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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