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Roast Ducks

Roast Ducks is a dish of duck roasted with bread crumbs, butter, spices, and served with gravy.

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 ↓

Roast Ducks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the duck

  1. Clean the duck thoroughly and rinse with soda and water.

  2. Soak in cold water for 30 minutes, then wipe dry.

  3. Stuff the duck with bread crumbs mixed with butter, pepper, salt, onion juice, and sage.

  4. Dredge the duck with salt, pepper, and flour.

Roast and baste

  1. Pour boiling water over the duck and roast covered for 12 minutes per pound for rare, or 15 minutes for well done.

  2. Baste the duck four times, the last time with butter, then dredge with flour and brown.

Make the gravy

  1. Chop the giblets for the gravy and thicken with browned flour.

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. Pepper + oniontop 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

Duck
Provides the main meat, whose fat renders during roasting to keep it moist and crisp the skin.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and seasoning in the stuffing, adding a soft, moist texture inside the bird.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and promotes browning of the skin during basting.
Flour
Dredged onto the skin and later browned, helping to brown the surface and thicken the gravy.

The step that matters

Roasting time per pound. Cooking time depends on the bird's weight, and roasting too long dries out the meat while too short leaves it underdone. Checking doneness matters for food safety.

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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