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Duck, Boiled
"A duck boiled is a duck spoiled" is an old proverb, but had the originator lived in the north of Wales it never would have been uttered. There they boil ducks often and well, but they salt them first, and serve them smothered with onion sauce. Time to simmer gently, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 3s. to 4s. Sufficient for four or more persons.
A method rather than a formula: the entry assumes you know how to salt a bird and make onion sauce, and gives you only the simmering time and the price. Two things carry the dish — the salting and the fact that the water must never actually boil.
- Salt first, and mean itThe salting is the whole point; an unsalted boiled duck is the "duck spoiled" of the proverb. The recipe gives no method, but modern versions of Welsh salt duck have the bird rubbed inside and out with coarse salt, turned daily and kept cold for two to three days, then rinsed and soaked briefly in fresh water to draw back the excess. Keep it refrigerated throughout; no saltpetre or nitrite is involved or wanted, as this is seasoning, not preservation.
- Simmer, do not boil"Simmer gently" means bare movement at the surface, around 180-190F. A rolling boil shreds the breast and turns the skin to slack rubber.
- The stated time is short for a modern birdThirty to forty minutes suits a small Victorian duck. A 4-5 lb supermarket duck wants closer to an hour and a quarter at a bare simmer; test the thigh joint, which should be loose and read 175F, while the breast will be pink-tinged and firm rather than raw.
- Onion sauceThe classic accompaniment is a béchamel enriched with onions boiled soft in milk and either chopped fine or sieved. Season it lightly — the duck brings its own salt to the plate.
- Use the cooking liquid with careThe broth will be salty and very fatty. Chill it, lift the fat cap for roasting potatoes, then taste before using the liquid in soup; it may need diluting by half.
- Cost and yield"3s. to 4s." is the Victorian price figure, of no use now beyond indicating that duck was not a cheap bird. Four servings is optimistic for a lean modern duck; three is more honest unless there is a substantial garnish, though the recipe itself says "four or more".
Salt duck is a genuine north Wales dish — often called hwyaden hallt, though the Welsh name circulates in more than one form — and Cassell's is doing something slightly unusual here in citing a regional practice to overturn an English proverb. Salting poultry before boiling firms the flesh and seasons it right through. The dish survived in Welsh farmhouse cooking well into the twentieth century and was later championed by the food writer Bobby Freeman, whose work on Welsh cookery brought it back to wider notice. Onion sauce as the partner for boiled poultry and mutton was common in British kitchens of the period; the pairing here is conventional even if the duck is not.