Home › The Principles of Cookery › Duck, Wild, Ragout Of
Duck, Wild, Ragout Of
Cut the remains of cold wild duck into neat pieces, and lay them in a stewpan with the gravy that was left. Simmer slowly over the fire for fifteen minutes, then dish up, and garnish with small croutons. The juice of an orange in the gravy is an improvement. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A made dish for the second day, assuming a roast wild duck and its gravy already in the larder. The whole point is gentle reheating, so treat the timing as an upper limit rather than a target.
- Reheat, do not cook againThe duck is already roasted; fifteen minutes of simmering will dry breast meat that was served rare the night before. Bring the gravy to a bare shiver, slip the pieces in, and give them five to eight minutes just to heat through.
- Carve first, sauce secondTake the breasts off whole and slice them on the bias, and pull the legs apart at the joint. Neat, even pieces heat at the same rate; ragged scraps overcook at the edges.
- If there is no leftover gravyFew modern cooks keep roasting gravy in a bowl in the cold larder. Simmer the carcass with an onion, a bay leaf and a glass of red wine for an hour, strain, and reduce to a scant cup for two ducks' worth of meat.
- The orangeVictorian recipes pairing orange with duck often have the bitter Seville in mind, and Sevilles are a winter fruit. A sweet orange plus a squeeze of lemon gets closer to that sharpness; add it off the heat so it stays bright.
- CroutonsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter or in the duck fat, not baked cubes. Add them at the moment of serving or they soften in the sauce.
- Wild duck todayMallard, teal and widgeon come from a game dealer in season, and are far leaner and stronger flavoured than farmed Pekin or Barbary. If using farmed duck leftovers, skim the gravy hard; there will be a great deal more fat.
- Yield and costThe remains of one wild duck make a starter for two or a light supper for one; two ducks feed four. The "probable cost, 2s. 6d." most likely reflects the price of the original bird rather than of this dish, and belongs to the late-Victorian market.
Cassell's, like other large Victorian household dictionaries, runs a chain of entries for every bird and joint: roast, then hashed, then curried, then a ragout, on the assumption that a household bought whole and ate through. Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite; in English cookery books the word covers both meat stewed from raw and, as here, cooked meat cut up and reheated in its own sauce. Wild duck in season appeared on ordinary middle-class tables, shot on the marshes and sold by the brace, and it was conventionally served very underdone, which is exactly what makes the next day's pieces worth treating so carefully. The pairing of duck with bitter orange is generally traced to French practice and appears in English kitchens long before Cassell's, usually with the Seville fruit that arrived in the winter months.