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Roast Brace of Ducks
Dress and clean a brace (two) young domestic or wild ducks. Truss same as goose. If domestic ducks are used they may be stuffed. In the wild ducks place in each a head of celery; this is thought to improve their flavor. Domestic ducks should always be cooked "well done" and twice as long as wild ducks. Place the ducks on rack in dripping pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, cover breast and legs with very thin slices of fat salt pork. Place in a hot oven and roast one and one-quarter hours, basting every five minutes (with fat in pan) for the first half hour, afterwards every ten minutes. Domestic ducks require a hotter oven than wild ducks or fowl. When tender, remove string and skewers. Place on hot serving platter, surround with Thorn Apples and serve with Olive sauce. 2 cups cracker crumbs. 1 cup English walnut meats broken in small bits.
A straightforward barded roast, but it treats two very different birds as one recipe. Decide first whether you have a farmed duck or a wild one, because almost everything else follows from that.
- Domestic and wild are not interchangeableA supermarket Pekin duck of 5 to 6 lb has a thick fat layer and tough connective tissue and wants a long roast; a wild mallard or teal is lean, dark and dries out in minutes. The stated hour and a quarter suits the domestic bird and will ruin the wild one, which is normally roasted hot and fast and served pink in the breast.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 425 to 450F in modern terms. For a domestic duck you can hold it there the whole time, or start hot and drop to about 375F after the first half hour to reduce spatter. Wild duck goes in hot, 15 to 25 minutes depending on size.
- A braceTwo birds, a term borrowed from game shooting. Two domestic ducks will feed four to six; two wild ducks feed two to four, since much of a wild duck's weight is frame.
- The salt porkBarding with very thin sheets of fat salt pork is essential on wild duck, which has no fat of its own to protect the breast. On a farmed duck it is optional and arguably counterproductive: the bird renders plenty of its own fat, and the pork keeps the skin from crisping. Score the skin in a diamond pattern instead.
- Basting every five minutesFrequent basting on a fatty domestic duck mainly cools the oven; pour off the rendered fat once or twice instead and save it. Basting genuinely helps on lean wild birds.
- The celeryA head of celery in the cavity of a wild duck acts as an aromatic rather than a stuffing. It was traditionally believed to take up some of the strong flavour of a wild bird; the recipe says only that it 'is thought to improve their flavor', and does not say what becomes of it.
- The two orphan ingredientsThe cracker crumbs and walnuts at the end are presumably the stuffing for the domestic birds, which the recipe says 'may be stuffed', but no fat, liquid, seasoning or method is given. Use a crumb-and-nut dressing you already trust, and note that stuffing pushes the roasting time out; cook it separately if you want reliable timing.
- DonenessFarmed duck legs are pleasant at 175 to 185F, where the collagen has gone; the breast on a whole roast bird will be well past pink, which is what the original intends by "well done." Wild duck breast is usually taken at 130 to 135F.
- Thorn Apples and Olive sauceBoth appear to be separate recipes elsewhere in the book; the second is presumably a brown sauce with stoned olives. Note that the botanical thorn apple, Datura, is a poisonous plant and has nothing to do with it.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbooks organised as a year of menus, one full dinner for each Sunday, aimed at the middle-class household that ate its principal meal in the middle of the day. The wild fowl season and the market for winter game birds coincided with the holiday table. By this date the Long Island duck industry had made farmed Pekin duck a cheap and reliably fatty bird, while shot mallard, teal and canvasback were still ordinary market goods rather than the specialist item they became after migratory bird protection tightened in the following decades. The trick of stuffing a wild duck with celery to soften its flavour is traditional rather than documented.