Clean and cut the duck into pieces and season with salt and pepper; then cut ½ pound of bacon into dice pieces and put in a large saucepan with 1 onion and 2 carrots. Cut fine 1 herb bouquet, a few cloves and a few peppercorns; add the duck. Let all cook slowly with 1 cup of stock until tender; then add 1 cup of red wine. Thicken the sauce with flour, boil and serve hot.
A plain braise with a short ingredient list and no oven work. The text runs the vegetables and duck together in one pan, so the main decisions are about fat and heat.
- Render the bacon firstFry the diced bacon until the fat runs before the onion, carrot and duck go in. Adding everything cold, as the sentence order suggests, leaves the bacon flabby and gives you no fat to brown the duck in.
- Brown the duckThe recipe skips this, but colouring the seasoned pieces skin-side down and pouring off the excess fat is what gives the sauce depth. Duck renders a great deal of fat; leave more than a tablespoon or two in the pan and the finished sauce will be greasy.
- Herb bouquetA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf. Tie it with string rather than cutting it fine as written, so it can be lifted out before serving.
- Cloves and peppercorns"A few" is vague; three or four cloves and a dozen peppercorns is a reasonable reading. Tie them into the bouquet or a scrap of cheesecloth unless you want to fish them out of the sauce.
- Liquid and heatOne cup of stock is not enough to submerge a jointed duck, so keep the lid on and the heat at a bare simmer. Turn the pieces once or twice.
- TimingExpect 1 to 1½ hours for legs and thighs. Breast pieces are done much sooner; lift them out at about 30 minutes and return them at the end if you want them pink rather than shredding.
- The wineAdding the cup of red wine only at the end means it needs a few minutes of open boiling to lose its raw edge. Reduce it before you thicken.
- ThickeningA tablespoon of flour worked into softened butter and whisked into the simmering sauce gives a cleaner result than flour thrown in dry. Boil a minute or two to cook out the starch.
- YieldA 4-5 lb duck serves four, with rice, buckwheat groats or boiled potatoes to catch the sauce.
Books of this type, arranged as a dish a day with a nationality attached to each, appeared in American publishing in the early twentieth century, when "cookery of all nations" promised sophistication to a middle-class kitchen. The nationality labels are loose: this is essentially a French-style braise with bacon lardons, aromatics and a flour-thickened wine sauce, and what marks it as Russian appears to be little more than the duck itself. Duck had a place in Russian cooking, roasted with apples or soured cabbage and served with kasha. The pattern here, meat browned in salt pork or bacon fat and finished with red wine, turns up under several national headings in books of this period, which may say more about how such collections were assembled than about any one national table.