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WILD DUCK, FILLETS OF, WITH TRUFFLES (another way)
Clean two wild ducks, and cut off the flesh from the breasts and sides in neat slices. Put the carcases and giblets of the birds into a saucepan with a thick slice of fresh butter rolled in flour, and add half a dozen mushrooms and two shallots finely minced, the parings of two ounces of truffles, and a little salt, cayenne, and pounded mace. Shake the saucepan over the fire for a few minutes. Pour in a gill of good stock, stew the sauce till strong and well-flavoured, then add a large glass of claret. Fry the slices of duck in butter, drain and simmer gently in the sauce till tender.
A two-part method: a quick fumet from the carcasses and trimmings, then the breast fillets finished in it. The whole thing hangs on not overcooking the fillets.
- The hinge: brief cookingWild duck breast is lean and dark and turns liver-like and dry past medium. Sear the slices in butter for a minute or so a side, then let them sit in the barely-trembling sauce for two or three minutes only. "Till tender" in the original may reflect older or tougher birds than are usual today.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz or 150 ml. A "large glass" of claret is not standardised; treat it as 4-6 fl oz of dry red Bordeaux or similar.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié - roughly equal weights of soft butter and flour worked together. Here it goes in at the start, so the flour cooks out while the bones and aromatics sweat; you are making a lightly thickened brown sauce rather than thickening at the end.
- Truffle paringsThe recipe puts only the peelings in the sauce and does not say what becomes of the rest of the two ounces. Tinned truffle peelings can still be found; failing that, a small amount of chopped preserved truffle, or the liquid from a tin, stands in. Truffle oil is a different thing and will dominate.
- Pounded maceThe outer covering of nutmeg, ground. Sold as ground mace; a good pinch. Nutmeg is close enough if you have none, used sparingly.
- Wild duck todayLegally taken wild mallard or teal is small - a pair yields four modest breasts, so two servings. Farmed duck breast works but is fattier and milder; score and render the fat rather than frying in butter.
- Shot and sinewIf working with genuinely wild birds, check the fillets for shot and pull out the silver sinew running along the breast before slicing, or it will contract in the pan.
- StrainingThe original never says to strain, but the sauce is built on bones and giblets. Pass it through a sieve before returning it to the pan for the fillets.
Cassell's gives several treatments of wild duck, which may suggest that game came into middle-class Victorian kitchens with some regularity rather than as a rarity. The pairing of duck with claret and truffle is straight out of the French repertoire that came to dominate English cookery writing over the course of the nineteenth century, and the technique here - making a quick sauce from the very carcass the fillets came off - is the professional habit of wasting nothing, scaled down for a household with one cook. Mace and cayenne date it: both were standard in English game seasoning well into the nineteenth century. Truffles at this period came largely from P igord and Piedmont and were sold tinned as well as fresh, with the peelings a cheaper by-product used exactly as they are used here, for flavouring sauces.