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NOTE (Any ducks may be cooked)
Any ducks may be cooked as above. The common wild ducks, teal, etc., should always be parboiled with an onion or large carrot in the body, to extract the fishy taste. On tasting you will find the carrot or onion to have imbibed that disagreeable flavor.
Wild ducks should be a little underdone, stuffed with force-meat and chopped onions, and served with sharp sauce and cold slaw. Canvas-back ducks are in season from November to February They should be dressed with the heads on, and in other respects treated in the same manner as wild ducks.
A supplementary note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already read the roast duck method preceding it, and adds the adjustments wild birds need. The advice is sound in outline, but the parboiling step deserves a second look.
- The hinge: don't parboil a good birdFish-tasting flesh comes from diving ducks that feed on shellfish and small fish — mergansers, scoters, sometimes bluebills. Puddle ducks such as mallard, teal and wigeon are grain and vegetable feeders and taste clean; parboiling them only leaches out what you want to keep. Reserve the onion-and-carrot treatment for a bird you have already tasted and found strong.
- Cold slawAn older spelling of coleslaw, from the Dutch koolsla (from koolsalade) — cabbage salad. In books of this period it may mean shredded cabbage in a boiled dressing of vinegar, egg and cream as often as a mayonnaise-based one.
- Sharp sauceNineteenth-century usage for an acid pan or fruit sauce: currant jelly loosened with port and lemon, or a vinegar-and-shallot reduction. Anything tart enough to cut the fat of a wild bird will serve.
- Force-meatA seasoned ground stuffing, typically pork or veal with breadcrumbs, herbs and egg to bind. Cook it separately if you are serving the duck rare, since a stuffing of raw pork inside a bird taken out at 135F will not be safe.
- "A little underdone"Correct, and still current practice — wild duck breast is best at 130-135F internal and turns liver-like and dry beyond that. Legs and thighs are the opposite case and are better braised long and slow than roasted alongside the breast.
- Oven heatThe page gives no heat at all, and the method it refers back to is not reproduced here. For wild birds, a short roast at around 450F suits; low heat gives you grey meat before the skin colours.
- Heads onCanvasbacks were presented with head and neck intact, a practice usually explained as proof of species — the long blackish bill and sloping profile identified the bird at table. You will not get them this way now, and no supermarket sells them at all; wild duck must be shot under licence or bought from a game dealer where the law allows.
- YieldA mallard or canvasback serves one to two people; teal are small enough that one bird per person is standard. Allow 20-25 minutes for a mallard, 12-15 for a teal, and rest the bird at least ten minutes.
The canvasback's reputation rested on its diet: birds wintering on the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna Flats fed heavily on wild celery (Vallisneria), and the resulting flavour made them among the most expensive wild fowl on American menus in the later nineteenth century. They appeared on hotel and steamship bills of fare, and cookbooks of the period treat the bird as a benchmark of luxury — which is why the page bothers to note its season and its head-on presentation at all. The market hunting that supplied that trade was brought to an end in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, after which wild duck left commerce and became strictly a hunter's dish; canvasback populations declined further with the draining of prairie breeding marshes, and seasons on the species have been closed or tightly limited in various years since.