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Wild Duck, Hashed
Cut the remains of some roast ducks into neat joints and stew them for half an hour very slowly in the remainder of the gravy, adding more if necessary. Pile up high in a dish, pour the gravy over, and garnish with fried croutons.
A leftovers dish from the era when a roast bird was expected to reappear at a second meal. The whole thing turns on the gravy, since the recipe gives you nothing else.
- What "hashed" means hereNot minced or chopped fine, despite the name. Victorian hashes of game were jointed pieces reheated in their own sauce, closer to a small stew than to corned-beef hash.
- The gravy is the recipe"The remainder of the gravy" assumes a jug left from the roast. If you have none, reduce a good duck or brown stock with a little port or red wine and a spoonful of redcurrant jelly until it coats a spoon; wild duck gravy was traditionally sharp rather than sweet.
- Half an hour is for already-cooked meatThe bird is roasted. The stewing is only to warm through and take up the sauce, so keep it at a bare tremble and check at fifteen minutes. Hard simmering will squeeze breast meat dry and stringy.
- Joint it dry, not wetTake the legs off at the hip, lift the breasts whole from the bone, then slice each breast on a slant. Slicing after reheating tears the meat.
- Wild duck versus farmedMallard or teal is lean, dark and gamey, and roast breast is usually served rare, which means it can overcook a second time in minutes. Farmed Pekin or Barbary duck is fattier and more forgiving; skim the fat off the gravy before you reduce it.
- CroutonsBread cut into triangles or heart shapes and fried in clarified butter or duck fat until crisp, drained well, and set round the edge at the last moment so they stay dry.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much was left; the remains of two wild ducks might stretch to two modest portions, and one farmed duck to about the same. Serve with mashed or fried potatoes and something acid, such as pickled walnuts or a watercress salad.
Cassell's belongs to a tradition of household cookery in which the recipe for a roast implies half a dozen further recipes for what is left of it, and hashes, salmis, croquettes and rissoles fill many pages of these dictionaries. Wild duck often reached the British kitchen through the shooting season as much as through the butcher, arriving in irregular numbers and needing to be used up, and the accompanying flavours the period favoured with it — port, orange, lemon, cayenne, redcurrant — all sit in the gravy this dish reheats. The fried croutons are a stock Victorian garnish, generally traced to French practice, and served the practical purpose of adding bulk and crispness to a dish assembled from remnants.