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Widgeon, Grilled
Cut the remains of roast widgeon into joints, well season with cayenne pepper, salt, chopped onion, and mustard, and grill over a clear fire. Arrange on a hot dish, pour some warmed butter over a little chopped parsley, and serve it with the widgeon.
This is a second-day dish from the game larder: cold roast wild duck, devilled with cayenne and mustard and coloured over live coals. Everything hinges on the fact that the meat is already cooked.
- Do not cook it twiceThe joints go over the fire only long enough to heat through and take some colour — two to three minutes a side under a very hot broiler or over coals. Wigeon is lean, dark and dry-eating, and a second full cooking turns it to leather.
- "Grill over a clear fire"A clear fire is one burnt down past flame to steady glowing coals, with no smoke. The modern equivalent is a broiler on its highest setting with the rack close, or a charcoal grill after the coals have greyed over.
- The mustard is powderThe mustard is probably powder -- In Victorian devils, "mustard" usually means dry English mustard powder, rubbed on with the cayenne and salt so it forms a crust. Prepared jarred mustard adds vinegar and tends to slide off in the heat; if that is all you have, use it sparingly as a paste.
- Chopped onion on the outsideRaw onion on the surface of a grilled joint scorches before it softens. Either grate it very fine so it melts into the seasoning paste, or soften it first in a little butter.
- Sorting the sentence outThe butter and parsley are the sauce, essentially a loose maitre d'hotel without the lemon. The wording is ambiguous: it may mean the parsley is laid on the hot dish and the melted butter poured over it, or simply that the buttered parsley is served alongside the joints. A squeeze of lemon or a spoon of the roasting juices is a fair addition.
- If you have no wigeonWigeon is a wild duck, taken in season by shooting; it is not a supermarket bird, though game dealers handle it in season, and a shot bird needs checking for pellets. Cold roast duck legs and breast, or leftover roast pigeon or teal, behave the same way under the broiler.
- YieldA wigeon is a small duck, roughly 1 to 1.5 lb whole and rather less once dressed. The joints from one bird make a single generous breakfast or savoury course; reckon two birds for a light supper for two.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a shot bird was expected to appear twice at table: roasted whole the first day, then jointed, devilled and grilled the next. Devilling — cayenne, mustard, salt, a hot fire — was a common Victorian treatment for cold cooked meat and game, and dishes of this kind were as likely to be served at breakfast or as a late-evening savoury as at dinner. Wigeon (spelled widgeon here) is a wild duck of estuaries and flooded grassland, generally reckoned in nineteenth-century game cookery below teal and above the coarser diving ducks, and often said to taste of whatever it had been feeding on; birds off saltings were prized, birds off inland weed less so. The strong seasoning suited a lean dark meat, and would also have helped with a bird that had hung a few days longer than was ideal.