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Roast Wild Duck

Roast wild duck with butter, flour, onion, and coarse sea salt, served with gravy and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Roast Wild 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. Truss the wild duck.

  2. To reduce any fishy taste, baste the duck with hot water mixed with an onion and a little coarse sea salt before switching to butter.

  3. Roast the duck in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 20 to 35 minutes, depending on your preference.

  4. Do not baste the duck for the first 5 minutes to keep the gravy in.

  5. Baste the duck generously with butter after the first 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Baste the duck again a few minutes before serving.

  2. Lightly dredge the duck with flour a few minutes before serving.

  3. Serve the duck with a good gravy or orange gravy.

  4. Garnish the duck with a cut lemon.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Wild duck
Is the main protein; its rich, gamy flesh is the centrepiece of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture to the skin during basting, promoting browning and a rich flavour.
Flour
Lightly dusted on the duck before serving, it helps the surface brown and thickens the gravy.
Onion
Simmered in the hot water basting liquid, it adds aroma that helps mask a fishy taste.

The step that matters

Delaying the first basting. Basting in the first 5 minutes is skipped so the fat and juices stay in the pan for the gravy and the skin is not chilled by liquid. Wait until the skin has begun to render and firm before basting with butter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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