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Duck, Wild, Hashed
Carve the duck neatly as helped at table, put the joints into a stewpan with a pint of good brown gravy, add a table-spoonful of Seville orange-juice or lemon pickle, a glass of claret, mixed spice, salt, and cayenne to taste, and thicken with bread-crumbs. Let it get gradually hot, and when on the point of boiling, serve with sippets of toast as a garnish. Any cold wild fowl may be hashed as above, but for pheasants and partridges use white wine instead of claret. Time, from fifteen to twenty minutes.
A Victorian way of using up cold roast game, and it depends entirely on gentle heat: the duck is already cooked, so the pan work is about warming through and reducing, not stewing.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to serve "when on the point of boiling" is the hinge. Cold roast duck brought to a simmer tightens and turns to string within a minute or two; keep the pan just below a tremble and take it off as soon as the meat is hot through.
- Start with cold cooked duckThis is a leftovers dish, not a way to cook a raw bird. Use the carved joints from a roast mallard or teal, or a roast domestic duck if wild is not available — the flavour is milder and fattier, so lean on the citrus.
- A pint of good brown gravyAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 US cups. "Good brown gravy" here means a proper brown stock or sauce rather than a thin pan gravy; a strong duck or beef stock reduced by half, with a little butter and flour, does the job.
- A glass of claretIn these books a wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or anything similar; for the pheasant and partridge version use a dry white.
- Seville orange-juice or lemon pickleSeville oranges are the sour marmalade sort, in season only in late winter. Substitute two parts orange juice to one part lemon. Lemon pickle was a spiced, salted lemon preserve kept in Victorian larders; preserved lemon, finely chopped, is the nearest thing now, and a tablespoon is enough.
- Mixed spiceThe British sweet-spice blend — cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, sometimes mace and ginger. A quarter teaspoon is plenty in a pint of sauce; more and it reads as pudding.
- Thicken with bread-crumbsThe recipe does not specify which; dry crumbs behave better than fresh soft ones, whisked in a spoonful at a time off the boil until the sauce coats a spoon. They will keep swelling, so stop while it still looks slightly thin.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, arranged round the edge of the dish. Cut and fry them while the pan warms so they stay crisp.
- YieldOne wild duck hashed this way serves two; the quantity of sauce will comfortably carry the meat from two birds if you are feeding four.
Hashes of this kind were the respectable second act of a Victorian game dinner: a wild duck was expensive and small, and what came back from the table was reheated in a sharp, spiced brown sauce rather than eaten cold. The combination of red wine, sour orange and warm spice is often traced to the much older English and French bigarade and "sauce for wild fowl" traditions, where acidity was used to cut the strong, oily flavour of mallard and widgeon. Lemon pickle was a standard bottled sharpener in a nineteenth-century store cupboard. The note that pheasant and partridge take white wine instead of claret may reflect a broader habit of pairing dark-fleshed wildfowl with red wine and pale-fleshed game birds with white, though the line itself is the only evidence here.