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Ducks-Canvas-Back-Roasted
Having trussed the ducks put into each a thick piece of soft bread that has been soaked in port wine. Place over a quick fire and roast from threequarters to an hour. Before sending to the table squeeze over each the juice of a lemon or orange, and serve them up very hot with their own gravy about them. Eat them with currant jelly. Have ready, also, a gravy made by stewing slowly in a saucepan the giblets of the ducks in butter rolled in flour and as little water as possible. Serve up this additional gravy in a boat.
A short spit-roast recipe written for cooks who had wild ducks in quantity and a hot open fire. The method translates to a very hot oven, but the timing does not — this is the one thing to change.
- "A quick fire" means very hotFor a modern oven that is roughly 450–475F, with the birds on a rack in a shallow pan. The high heat is right; canvasback was generally cooked hard and fast.
- Three-quarters to an hour is too longThree-quarters to an hour is long by modern taste -- A whole canvasback (roughly 1.5–2.5 lb dressed) reaches the rare-to-medium-rare breast this dish is built around in about 18–25 minutes at 450F. Longer roasting tends to give the dry, liverish meat that gave wild duck its bad reputation. For a rare breast, pull the birds when the thickest part reads 130–135F and rest ten minutes.
- Canvasback specificallyA regulated migratory game bird in North America — legal to hunt under federal and state seasons and limits, but not sold commercially. Any wild duck works here; farmed mallard or a Pekin breast will also take the treatment, though a Pekin carries far more fat and wants longer.
- The bread is a stuffing you throw awayThe bread may be a flavour-absorber -- Port-soaked bread packed in the cavity is usually explained as a way to take up the strong fishy-grassy notes wild diving ducks can carry and to keep the interior moist; on that reading it is discarded rather than eaten, though the recipe itself does not say so. Use a dense white bread and about 1/4 cup of port per bird.
- TrussingTie the legs together and pin the wings close with kitchen string. It matters more at this heat than at a low one, since loose limbs scorch before the breast is done.
- The giblet gravyChop the hearts, gizzards and necks (leave out the liver, which turns bitter with long stewing), brown them in a tablespoon of butter worked with a tablespoon of flour, and barely cover with water. Forty-five minutes at a bare simmer gives a strong, dark cup of gravy — start it before the ducks go in the oven. Strain it into the boat.
- YieldOne canvasback serves one person, or two if the birds are large and the rest of the meal is substantial.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, served cold in a small dish alongside — not melted into the sauce. Any sharp, unsweetened-tasting red fruit jelly stands in.
Canvasback was the most celebrated wild duck in nineteenth-century America, and the reason was diet: the birds fed heavily on wild celery in the Chesapeake and other Atlantic estuaries, which was generally credited with giving the flesh a clean, nutty flavour unlike other diving ducks. Terrapin, oysters and canvasback made up the standard trio of American luxury foods on hotel and club menus, and a brace of canvasback commanded prices that put them beyond most tables. The insistence here on high heat, a short roast, lemon or orange juice, and currant jelly is the classic Maryland-Baltimore treatment, repeated with little variation across American cookbooks. By the time this book appeared, market hunting had already begun to thin the flocks badly; commercial sale of migratory waterfowl was ended in the United States in the following decades, which is why a dish once widely familiar is now something only a hunter can put on the table.