Season and roast the duck; then cut into pieces for serving. Chop the giblets; add to the gravy in which the duck was roasted, with 1 glass of red wine, ¼ teaspoonful of paprica, a pinch of cloves and the juice of a lemon. Let boil; add the sliced duck and let simmer until tender. Serve hot; garnish with fried croutons.
A two-stage duck: roasted first, then finished in a wine-and-paprika gravy. The original assumes you already know how to roast a bird, so the useful detail is in the timings and the ambiguous measures.
- Roast it shortThe book gives no temperature and no timing, so what follows is modern guidance rather than anything in the text. Because the pieces simmer again in the gravy, there is a case for taking the duck out before it is fully done: a 4-5 lb bird in a hot oven for roughly an hour, then jointed and simmered 20-30 minutes, lands in about the right place, where a fully roasted bird risks drying out in the pan.
- "1 glass of wine"An unfixed measure in period cookbooks; a wineglassful is commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup), though larger glasses were certainly used and the recipe says only "glass." Start with a quarter to a half cup and judge by how much roasting gravy you have.
- "Paprica"Sweet Hungarian paprika, not smoked Spanish pimentón and not the hot grade. A quarter teaspoon is very restrained for a dish called Hungarian; a full teaspoon is closer to what the name implies. Stir it into warm fat off direct heat, since paprika scorches quickly and turns bitter.
- Skim the fatA roasted duck throws off a great deal of fat, and the recipe does not mention pouring it off. Skim all but a tablespoon or two before adding the wine, or the sauce will not come together.
- The gibletsHeart, gizzard and neck meat, chopped fine. The liver goes in only at the very end, or it will turn grainy and muddy the sauce. Modern ducks are often sold with the giblet packet inside the cavity; use it here rather than buying stock.
- Lemon at the endAdded with the wine as written, the juice will cook flat over a long simmer. Hold back half of it and stir it in just before serving to keep the sauce bright against the duck fat.
- CroutonsSmall cubes of white bread fried in butter or in some of the reserved duck fat until crisp. Fry them while the duck simmers and keep them dry; they soften within minutes of hitting the sauce.
- YieldOne duck of this size serves three, or four if there is a starch alongside. Buttered noodles or dumplings suit the sauce better than potatoes.
The book belongs to a genre popular around the turn of the twentieth century: a dish for every day of the year, each tagged with a nationality — the surrounding pages here run Russian pickled herring on the 17th and venison a la Parisienne on the 19th. The nationality is often more gesture than geography, and this one leans on a single signal — paprika, which in English-language cookbooks of the period was widely used as shorthand for anything Hungarian, though paprika itself only became central to Hungarian cooking in the nineteenth century. The underlying method, roasting a bird and then finishing the joints in a spiced wine gravy, is much older and thoroughly pan-European; the cloves and lemon juice read as a survival of the sweet-sour, spice-heavy sauces of earlier centuries. Fried croutons were a common garnish of the period for dishes served in sauce.