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Wild Duck, Fillets of, with Truffles
Fry the slices of duck in butter till they are lightly browned. Put them into a clean saucepan, pour the sauce over, and add truffles pared and cut into slices. Let them simmer very gently for five minutes, stir a table-spoonful of lemon-juice into the gravy, and let it simmer five minutes longer. Take the slices of duck up carefully, arrange them neatly on a dish, pour the gravy round them, and serve very hot. Time, about ten minutes to simmer the fillets in the sauce. Probable cost of wild ducks, 4s. to 5s. per pair. Sufficient for a dish.
A fragment of a larger method: like most entries in Cassell's, it assumes you have already read the neighbouring ones and have a sauce standing ready. Everything hinges on not overcooking the breasts a second time.
- The missing sauceThe recipe never says what "the sauce" is; the entry assumes a sauce already made elsewhere in the book. In a work of this period that would most likely be a brown game sauce of the salmi type, built from the carcass and trimmings and strained, but the entry itself specifies neither the sauce nor the quantity. Have it hot before the fillets go near the pan.
- Fillets means breastsTwo wild ducks give four breast fillets, skinned and sliced on the bias, or left whole and carved after. Wild duck breast is dark, lean and fine-grained, nothing like the fatty domestic Aylesbury or Pekin breast.
- Ten minutes is too long for raw meatTen minutes is a long simmer -- The slices are already fried in butter until lightly browned before they go into the sauce, so ten minutes further simmering will take lean wild duck well past pink and leave it grey and tight. Warm the browned slices through briefly instead, or lift them out and let the sauce and truffles simmer alone.
- Lemon juice lastAdding acid at the end lifts a heavy reduced brown sauce. The recipe gives a tablespoonful, with no sauce quantity stated; it should not boil hard afterwards or the brightness cooks off.
- TrufflesFresh black winter truffle, pared and sliced thin, needs little more than the warmth of the sauce, though this recipe simmers it. Preserved truffle in jars was common in the period. Good dried or preserved wild mushrooms give a different but honest dish; truffle oil does not.
- The price noteFour to five shillings a brace was a significant outlay in a late-Victorian household, and truffles added considerably to it. "Sufficient for a dish" means one course in a multi-course dinner, so four fillets served two to four people alongside other plates.
- Gamey birdsWild duck varies enormously. Mallard is mild, widgeon and teal sweeter, and birds that have been feeding on the shore can taste strongly of fish or mud. Cook one breast and taste before committing expensive truffles to the pan.
Cassell's dictionary entries like this one belong to the salmi tradition — a French treatment in which roasted game birds are carved, the carcasses turned into a strong brown sauce, and the fillets briefly reheated in it. It was a dish of the shooting season and the late-nineteenth-century dinner table, where wildfowl arrived from the marshes of Norfolk, Essex and Lincolnshire and were traditionally sent up very rare. Truffles, imported from Périgord and Piedmont and sold both fresh and in preserving jars, functioned in English cookery books of this period much as they do in restaurant menus now: a marker that the dish was expensive and that the household could afford a cook who knew French practice. The compressed, allusive style — "pour the sauce over", with no sauce given — is characteristic of the dictionary format, which cross-referenced heavily and expected the reader to work across entries rather than down a single page.