Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ducklings, Roasted
Ducklings, Roasted
Make a stuffing thus. Boil four middle-sized onions ten or twelve minutes, and chop them very fine; add a table-spoonful of bread-crumbs, equal quantities of powdered sage, pepper, and flour of mustard-half a salt-spoonful of each-a tea-spoonful of brandy, and an ounce or more of dissolved butter, with salt to taste; or if preferred the following stuffing may be used. Two ounces of bread-crumbs, the same of butter, a little chopped parsley, two leaves of sage powdered, a small bit of lemon-peel, three shallots, with pepper and salt. Roast the ducks before a quick fire, give them a steady basting for about half an hour, then serve with the gravy which has dripped from them, to which add a good squeeze of lemon-juice, a tea-spoonful of soy, a little cayenne, or any sauce preferred, and stock if required: thicken and send to table in a tureen.
A Victorian spit-roasting recipe with two alternative stuffings and a made gravy. Almost all of the translation work is in the fire, the timing and one bottled ingredient.
- What a duckling wasA duckling here is a young bird, probably in the region of 3 to 4 lb dressed, at or below the smaller end of the Pekin ducks sold today. The recipe names no number of birds or eaters, but a duckling that size will feed two, three at a stretch.
- "A quick fire" and the half hourThe original assumes a bird turning on a spit in front of open radiant heat, basted constantly, where thirty minutes could brown and cook a small duckling. In a modern oven, take "quick" as 425F and expect closer to an hour for a 3-4 lb bird; the thigh joint should reach 165F while the breast can sit at 135-140F for pink meat.
- Rendering the fatDuck skin needs its fat drawn out or it stays flabby. Score the skin lightly, start the bird breast up in the hot oven, and pour off the accumulated fat once or twice rather than basting with it as the original directs. Save the fat; it keeps for months refrigerated.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon held about a quarter teaspoon, so "half a salt-spoonful of each" is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon of sage, pepper and mustard. That is a very restrained seasoning for four boiled onions; taste and increase.
- Flour of mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Colman's or any plain yellow mustard powder does the job.
- Soy"A tea-spoonful of soy" means soy sauce, sold in Britain from the eighteenth century onward as a dark bottled condiment for gravies. Use a dark soy or a good Japanese shoyu; the point is colour and savour in a thin pan gravy.
- Onion stuffing, cooked separatelyThe first stuffing is essentially a wet onion-and-sage paste. Packing it inside the cavity slows the bird and risks undercooked filling; bake it in a small dish alongside for the last twenty minutes, or cook it into the gravy. The second stuffing, breadcrumbs with shallot, parsley and lemon peel, behaves better in the cavity.
- The gravyPan drippings from a duck are mostly fat. Spoon the fat off, deglaze the tin with a little stock, then add the lemon juice, soy and cayenne. "Thicken" means a small amount of flour or a beurre manié whisked in; a tureen is optional.
Roast duckling belongs to the spring and early summer, when birds hatched that season came to market young and tender enough to want nothing but fire and basting; older ducks were braised or made into stews. The two stuffings on offer track a real division in nineteenth-century English cookery: the boiled-onion-and-sage mixture is the older, plainer tradition, close to the sage and onion still served with goose and pork, while the breadcrumb version with shallot, parsley and lemon peel is often said to reflect the lighter forcemeats that came in with French influence. The gravy is characteristic of the same decades, when bottled soy, cayenne and lemon were the standard trio for lifting a thin pan juice into something worth passing at table.