Clean and season the duck; then chop the giblets. Add 1 onion, some celery and parsley. Mix with 1 cup of bread-crumbs and a beaten egg. Season this highly and fill the duck. Put in the dripping-pan with some hot water, ½ glass of sherry and a lump of butter. Sprinkle with flour; bake until done. Serve with apple-sauce.
A plain English roast duck with a giblet-and-crumb stuffing, written for a cook who already knew how long a duck takes. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the fat, and the doneness of the stuffing.
- Oven and time"Bake until done" leaves the cook to judge. As a modern working figure, roast at 325-350F for roughly 20 minutes per pound, so about 1 hour 40 minutes for a 5 lb bird. The breast should read 165F and the thigh joint should move freely.
- The stuffing is the hingeRaw chopped giblets packed into a bird are slow to heat through. Sweat the giblets, onion and celery in butter first, stuff loosely rather than tightly, and check that the centre of the stuffing itself reaches 165F, not just the meat.
- Half a glass of sherryA wine glass in period recipes is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, which would make half a glass roughly 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons. Any dry or medium sherry works; the water and sherry in the pan are there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to braise the bird.
- Deal with the fatDuck renders a great deal of fat, which the original cook simply expected. Prick the skin over the breast and legs before roasting and pour off the pan fat once or twice, or the water-and-sherry base will turn into a greasy pool rather than a gravy.
- The flourDredging the bird with flour is a nineteenth-century trick for a crisp, freckled skin and a lightly thickened pan liquid. Use a light dusting only; a heavy coat goes pasty under the rendering fat.
- "Season highly"The recipe names only onion, celery and parsley, and leaves the rest to the cook. If you want the familiar English duck stuffing, sage is the usual addition, with thyme, plenty of black pepper and salt -- about a teaspoon of dried sage, or a tablespoon chopped fresh, to the cup of crumbs.
- Bread-crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and set hard. One cup of crumbs and one egg suits a duck of 4-5 lb.
- YieldA duck of this size serves two generously or three modestly; ducks carry much less meat for their weight than a chicken. Roast two if you are feeding four or more.
Roast duck with a sage-and-onion-scented stuffing and a dish of apple sauce alongside is one of the fixed points of English cooking, recorded in domestic cookery books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and generally explained as a pairing of sharp fruit against rich, fatty meat -- the same logic that puts apple with pork. The giblets in the forcemeat are thrift: the neck, heart and gizzard came attached to the bird and were not to be wasted. This entry belongs to a book that assigns a country to each day of the year, so the recipe is doing double duty as a dish and as a national emblem; "English" here means the roast-and-apple-sauce tradition an American reader would have recognised immediately.