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Roast Ducks

Roast ducks stuffed with onion and sage, baked until golden, served with brown gravy, currant jelly, and optional green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and sage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,628 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the ducks carefully.

  2. Make a stuffing with the chopped onion and sage, then insert it into the ducks and sew them up completely.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the ducks in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 1 hour, basting frequently.

  2. A few minutes before serving, dredge the ducks lightly with flour to make them froth and look plump.

  3. Serve hot with brown gravy poured over the ducks, accompanied by currant jelly and green peas if in season.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + peastop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,460 recipes

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

  4. Sage + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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.
Flour
Dredged on the surface, it helps the skin froth and brown for a plumper look.
Fresh sage
Adds a savory, aromatic flavor to the stuffing inside the ducks.
Onion
Flavors the stuffing and adds aroma as the duck cooks.

The step that matters

Dredging the ducks with flour. Flour should be added only a few minutes before serving, since it needs dry heat to froth and brown; adding it too early can make it pasty or burn before the skin crisps.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, sage, flour, currant):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, sage, flour, currant. 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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