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DUCK (a la Portugaise)
Take a large plump duck, draw and clean it, joint it neatly and put it in a stewpan; sprinkle with salt, place the pieces of wings, legs, and breast on top, spread on each a small piece of butter, close tightly, and put the pan in a hot oven or over the closed stove for ten minutes. Take out the pieces of duck, and put the carcase in the stewpan with a pint of brown stock and a bunch of herbs (bouquet garni), and stew for half an hour, then add half a pint of Espagnole sauce, half a pint of tomato sauce, and a glass of sherry. Reduce a little. Slice four small tomatoes rather thickly, and fry them a little in butter. Cut three slices of ox tongue into narrow strips, and slice one truffle. Rub the sauce through a tammy cloth; put the pieces of duck in a stewpan with the sauce, truffle, and six or eight mushroom heads, and stew gently for about half an hour. Toss the strips of tongue in a little butter over a quick fire, just long enough to warm through. Season the stew with a pinch of pepper and one of nutmeg. Dish up on a pyramid of mashed potatoes, garnish round with the tomatoes, tongue, and mushrooms, sauce over with the liquor, and serve very hot. Probable cost, 7s.
A late-Victorian restaurant-style duck stew that assumes a stocked professional larder: Espagnole, tomato sauce and brown stock all made in advance. The work is in the sauce, not the bird.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups of brown stock and 1 1/4 cups each of Espagnole and tomato sauce. A "glass" of sherry most likely means a wineglassful, conventionally about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup); a dry amontillado or fino suits better than a cream sherry.
- Oven heat"A hot oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. The ten minutes is a preliminary step, not the cooking; the pan is closed, so the pieces set and give up some fat before they go back into the sauce.
- EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce of the French repertoire: brown roux, brown stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. Few home cooks keep it. A well-reduced brown veal or duck stock thickened lightly with a brown roux stands in; a commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical shortcut.
- Tammy clothA loose worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a double layer of muslin, does the same job and loses less sauce.
- Cook the legs longerThe single instruction worth overriding. Legs and thighs want 45 minutes to an hour in the sauce to become tender; breast pieces are dry and stringy well before that. Add the breast for only the last 10-15 minutes, or serve it separately, sliced.
- Ox tongue and truffleCooked, pressed ox tongue is a deli item in some places and a special order in others; a firm cured ham or good mortadella cut in matchsticks gives the same salty-pink garnish. Fresh truffle is a luxury the recipe treats as ordinary; a teaspoon of truffle paste stirred into the finished sauce is the honest substitute, and omitting it costs less than truffle oil does.
- Skim the fatDuck renders a great deal of fat during the initial roasting and again in the stew. Pour off and reserve the fat after the ten-minute browning, and skim the sauce again before it goes through the sieve, or the finished dish will be greasy under the tomato.
- Yield and costA large duck jointed this way serves three, generously four. The "7s." is the estimated cost in shillings for the whole dish; Cassell's prints a probable cost throughout. It reflects the tongue, truffle and sherry more than the bird.
In nineteenth-century kitchen French, à la portugaise generally signalled tomatoes, and this duck follows the convention: tomato sauce in the liquor and fried tomato slices round the dish. The rest of the method belongs to the grande cuisine tradition associated with Carême and carried on by Escoffier's generation: a bird set in a closed pan, its carcass drawn for stock, the stock fortified with Espagnole, the whole passed through a tammy and garnished with tongue, truffle and mushroom. Cassell's prints a "probable cost" in shillings for its recipes throughout.