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Roast Duck

Roast duck stuffed with sage, onion, thyme, bread crumbs, and butter, baked until browned and served with cranberry jelly or apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,485 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Duck

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 and roast

  1. Prepare the ducks for roasting as you would for roast goose.

  2. Stuff the ducks with sage, onion, thyme, bread crumbs, and butter.

  3. Baste well with coarse sea salt, water, and the ducks' own gravy.

  4. Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for one hour or until thoroughly cooked and browned.

Serve

  1. Serve with cranberry jelly 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. Sage + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,485 recipes

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

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Thyme + cranberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together43 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sage + cranberrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young ducks
Provide the main meat, with fat that renders during roasting to keep the flesh moist and crisp the skin.
Butter
Adds fat inside the cavity that enriches flavor and helps the skin brown.
Bread crumbs
Absorb juices from the cavity and give the stuffing body and a softer texture.

The step that matters

Roast until thoroughly cooked and browned. Duck must reach a fully cooked interior while the skin browns. Checking doneness rather than relying only on the one-hour time matters, since bird size and oven variation change how long it takes.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, thyme, bread, butter, cranberry. 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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