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Duck, Hashed
Divide a roast duck into joints, take off the skin and lay them with some good gravy in a stewpan, add a little mixed spice, a glass of port, and a seasoning of salt and cayenne, skim off all fat, and when thoroughly hot thicken with butter and flour, and strain and serve the duck on a dish, the gravy round it, and with a garnish of bread sippets; or cut up the duck and boil the trimmings, adding a sliced onion previously fried in butter to one pint of stock, half a tea-spoonful of chopped lemon-peel, two of lemon-juice, and half a glass of port wine. Season with salt and pepper, and when it has well boiled, skim, strain, thicken, and add it to the duck. Stew, but do not boil. Serve as before with sippets of bread as a garnish. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to stew. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of using up a roast duck, and still one of the better ones. Two versions are given in a single paragraph: a quick one built on ready-made gravy, and a longer one that makes a small stock from the carcass and trimmings.
- The hinge: stew, never boilAlready-roasted duck is fully cooked; the pan is only bringing it back to temperature in the sauce. A boil tightens the meat fibres and turns the joints stringy. Hold the liquid at a bare shiver, and the fifteen to twenty minutes given is ample.
- A glass of portA Victorian wine glass was generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so read "a glass" as roughly a quarter cup and "half a glass" as about 2 tablespoons.
- Mixed spiceThe British sweet-spice blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves and ginger, still sold in jars and sometimes labelled pudding spice; savoury Victorian "mixed spice" was not always the same mixture. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for a pint of gravy; it should sit behind the port, not in front of it.
- Thicken with butter and flourEqual weights of soft butter and flour mashed to a paste, dropped in a little at a time and whisked into the barely simmering liquid. Perhaps 15 g of each per pint of gravy for a sauce that coats rather than clings.
- Skim properlyDuck renders a great deal of fat and it will pool on the surface twice, once when the joints first heat and again after thickening. Skimming both times is the difference between a glossy sauce and a greasy one; chilling the stock beforehand and lifting the cap is easier still.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter or duck fat until crisp, arranged around the rim. They go on at the last moment or they soften into the gravy.
- The second methodBoiling the trimmings with a fried sliced onion in a pint of stock makes a quick carcass stock rather than a long one; the recipe gives no time for it, only "when it has well boiled". Strain it well and taste before salting, since a reduced duck stock can carry more salt than expected.
- YieldFour to five as written; the recipe gives no indication of what else was on the table, and it will stretch less far served alone as a main course.
Hashes of this kind sit at the centre of nineteenth-century English household economy: the roast appeared whole and handsome on one day and returned, jointed and sauced, on the next. The recipe gives two methods in a single breath because the choice depended on what the kitchen already had — a jug of "good gravy" left from the roasting, or nothing but a picked carcass and a stockpot. The port, lemon peel and cayenne are the standard Victorian dressing for duck and other rich dark meats; the acidity and the spice cut fat that the cook could not otherwise remove, and the same trio turns up in the period's sauces for wild duck, hare and venison. Sippets are older than the book by centuries, generally traced to the medieval sop of bread laid under or around a dish of liquid, and by this period they had been reduced to a garnish that signalled a made dish rather than a plain one.