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Duck, Wild, with Port Wine
Take a freshly-killed wild duck. Truss it, and cover it with a strip of fat pork and a sheet of paper. Cook in a brisk oven for twenty minutes. Garnish with watercress and potato chips, and send to table with a port wine sauce made as follows. Fry an onion in butter with a bouquet garni, moisten with one pint of stock reduced to a demi-glace, boil and skim; strain, add a tea-spoonful of red-currant jelly, and a glass of port wine, and boil up. Probable cost, 4s. 6d.
A straightforward roast with a classic sauce; nearly everything that needs translating is in the oven setting and the vague sauce measures.
- "Brisk oven"Read this as 425-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat gives a rare breast on a bird of 1.5-2 lb; a larger mallard will need closer to 25-30 minutes, and the doneness of wild duck is judged by the breast, not the leg.
- Freshly killedThe instruction reflects a household that received birds in the feather. Wild duck now commonly arrives frozen and already hung; thaw it fully and dry the skin well before trussing, or the fat pork will steam rather than brown.
- Fat pork and paperThe pork bard supplies the fat a wild bird lacks, and the paper stops it scorching in a hot oven. Thin-sliced unsmoked fatback or unsmoked streaky bacon does the job; parchment replaces the kitchen paper.
- Demi-glace from a pintA pint of stock 'reduced to a demi-glace' means reduced hard -- by half at the least, and in practice often further -- until it coats a spoon. Use a strong brown stock; a pint of weak supermarket stock will reduce to salt water rather than sauce.
- A glass of portIn Cassell's period a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (roughly a quarter cup). Add it at the end as written and boil only briefly, enough to lose the raw spirit edge without cooking off the fruit.
- Bouquet garniParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, removed at the straining. The onion is better fried to a real brown than merely softened.
- Potato chipsThese are fried potatoes in the British sense, either thin crisps or straw potatoes rather than thick chips. Fry them separately and salt them at the last moment.
- YieldOne wild duck serves two modestly, or one generously. The sauce quantity given suits two to four servings, so it is easily stretched to a pair of birds.
Wild duck with port belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that Cassell's was written to codify for middle-class households: a game bird roasted very fast and served with a sharp-sweet brown sauce built on demi-glace, red-currant jelly and fortified wine. The pairing of game with currant jelly is long-established in British cooking, and port was well established as the standard English fortified wine, favourable duties on Portuguese wine from the early eighteenth century having made it cheaper than French claret. The costing at the end -- 4s. 6d., a substantial sum for a household dinner -- is a feature of the whole dictionary, which priced dishes so a housekeeper could budget a dinner before committing to it. The recipe also assumes a game supply and a poulterer's counter that no longer exist; wild duck was seasonal and generally sold whole, and a cook was expected to know how to truss it without being told.