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Duck, with Olives
This is a simple dish, but much liked in Provence. Cook a duck en braise (see DUCK, BRAISED). Prepare the gravy in the usual way, adding plenty of mushrooms after the gravy has been strained. Soak some olives for three hours remove the stones, put them into the gravy and boil up quickly. Then put in the duck and simmer twenty minutes. Serve on a hot dish, with the sauce poured over. Time to braise and stew, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A short recipe that leans on another entry in the same book: the duck is braised first, then finished in its own strained gravy with olives and mushrooms. Nearly all the work is in the braise.
- The cross-reference"Cook a duck en braise" means brown the bird, then cook it covered on a bed of aromatics with stock or wine barely halfway up, at a bare simmer. The recipe allows an hour and a half in total for braising and stewing, so the braise itself runs to roughly seventy minutes before the final 20 minutes with the olives; a large bird may need longer.
- Why the olives are soakedThe recipe does not say, but three hours in cold water reads as a desalting step rather than a softening one, olives of the period being generally sold in brine. Modern brine-cured green olives need little more than a rinse and perhaps 30 minutes in cold water, while salt-cured black olives benefit from longer. Taste one before deciding.
- Pit them yourselfOlives pitted at home, crushed lightly under a knife blade and picked clean, tend to hold their shape better through the final simmer than shop-pitted ones, which soften faster in hot gravy.
- Don't boil the olives long"Boil up quickly" is a brief step, not a sustained one. Long boiling softens olives and draws their salt into the sauce. Bring the gravy up, give the olives a minute of heat, then drop to a simmer once the duck goes back in.
- Degrease the gravyDuck braising liquid throws a great deal of fat. Strain the liquid as directed, then let it settle and lift the fat off before adding mushrooms, or the finished sauce will be greasy rather than glossy. The fat is worth keeping for potatoes.
- MushroomsThe recipe specifies only "plenty of mushrooms," added to the strained gravy. Small ones, whole or halved, suit the dish; they release water, so give them a few minutes in the gravy before the duck returns and reduce a little if the sauce loosens.
- Cost and yield3s. 6d. is the probable price of the whole dish in the later nineteenth century, not a measurement. It serves four to five with potatoes or bread; a single duck yields less meat than a chicken of the same weight.
Duck with olives belongs to the cooking of the lower Rhône, where olives were a pantry staple rather than a garnish, and the pairing of rich waterfowl with something salt and slightly bitter is the same logic that puts orange or cherries with duck elsewhere in France. Cassell's dictionary, compiled for English households in the late nineteenth century, routinely tags dishes with a region — \"much liked in Provence\"; the encyclopaedic format also explains the terseness, since the braising method is filed under its own heading and simply pointed to. A three-hour soak was assumed to be necessary before the olives were fit to go anywhere near a sauce.