Boiled Duck
Dress and rub well inside with salt and pepper, truss and tie in shape, drawing the legs in to the body, in which put one or two sage leaves, a little finely chopped onion, and a little jellied stock or gravy; rub over with salt and pepper; make a paste in the proportion of one-half pound butter to one pound flour, in which inclose the duck, tie a cloth around all, and boil two hours or until quite tender, keeping it well covered with boiling water. Serve by pouring round it brown gravy made as follows: Put a lump of butter of the size of an egg in a sauce-pan with a little minced onion; cook until slightly brown, then adding a small table-spoon of flour, stir well, and when quite brown add a half pint stock or water; let cook a few minutes, strain, and add to the chopped giblets, previously stewed till tender. - Mrs. L. S. Williston.
A duck sealed in a flour-and-butter crust, wrapped in cloth, and simmered — an old way of keeping a lean bird moist without a spit. The crust is packaging, not pastry.
- The hinge: the paste is a wrapper, not foodThe recipe gives no liquid and no thickness; half a pound of butter to a pound of flour would have been bound with enough water to make a stiff, workable sheet, rolled out to enclose the bird completely with no gaps. It absorbs water and is discarded; it was not meant to be eaten. Any split lets water in and you have poached duck in a paste soup.
- The clothThe recipe says only to tie a cloth around all: a clean cotton or linen cloth, tied so that it holds the paste in shape while it softens.
- Keep it covered with boiling waterThe instruction to keep it well covered with boiling water matters: top up from a kettle, not from the tap, or the pot drops off the boil and the timing goes out. The recipe says boil; a gentle boil treats the crust better than a violent one.
- Bird size and donenessAssume a 4 to 5 lb duck; a wild bird of 2 to 3 lb will be done well before two hours. Two hours of gentle simmering will carry a domestic duck comfortably past 165F in the thigh, which is where you want it for a moist-cooked bird. Check with a thermometer once unwrapped.
- Old measuresA lump of butter the size of an egg is about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. A half pint of stock is one cup. A "small table-spoon" of flour against that much butter gives a loose brown roux — a level tablespoon is close enough.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and neck stew for 45 minutes to an hour until tender; the liver goes in for the last five minutes only, or it turns granular and bitter. Chop them fine and add to the strained gravy off the heat.
- Browning the rouxThe recipe cooks the onion and butter until slightly brown, then browns the flour before the liquid goes in. That browning carries most of the sauce's flavour; underbrowned, it tastes of raw flour and does nothing for a boiled bird.
- Yield and servingA 4 to 5 lb duck serves three or four. There will be a good deal of rendered fat in the cavity juices — pour those off, skim, and use them to loosen the gravy. Something sharp on the side (apple sauce, pickled cabbage) does the work the crust and boiling water cannot.
Cooking a bird sealed in a coarse flour paste is an old English kitchen device — the crust is sometimes called a huff paste — and it survived into nineteenth-century American books as a way to cook lean or elderly poultry and game without drying it out over open heat. Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis, 1877) was assembled from contributed recipes, hence the many named credits like this one from Mrs. L. S. Williston. The sage and onion tucked into the cavity are the standard English duck seasoning, and giblet gravy built on a browned roux is common in mid-century domestic manuals. The method fell away as roasting became the default and as the paste came to look like a waste of a pound of flour and half a pound of butter.