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WILD DUCK, ROAST (Polish fashion)
Take two wild ducks, singe them, wash them inwardly, truss, put them in a kitchen basin, pour over them a little cooked marinade, and let them macerate for five or six hours. At the end of that time lay them in a roasing-pan with the marinade; cover them with buttered paper, and cook them, basting often. When half done, add to their cooking-stock two gills of good, thick, sour cream, and finish cooking, gently basting from time to time. Just before serving, draw, divest them of the string, and dish them up. Mix a little gravy with their cooking-stock, reduce the liquid, stirring till it is thickened like a sauce, then pour it over the birds.
A game bird treated the Central European way: soured in a cooked marinade, then roasted in it and finished with sour cream. The one thing to get right is the cream — it goes in only for the last stretch of cooking and must never be allowed to boil hard, or it will break into curds and fat.
- Two gills of sour creamIn British measure a gill is a quarter-pint (5 fl oz), so two gills is about half a pint, roughly 1 1/4 US cups. Use full-fat cultured sour cream or creme fraiche; low-fat versions split as soon as they meet a hot pan liquid.
- "Cooked marinade"A marinade that has been simmered and then cooled before use. A typical one is wine or vinegar with water, sliced onion, carrot, bay, thyme, peppercorns and a little oil, boiled briefly and left to go cold; the recipe itself specifies nothing beyond "cooked." Letting it cool is not optional -- pouring warm marinade over raw birds sits them in the danger zone for hours.
- Five or six hours to macerateDo this in the refrigerator, not in a basin on the counter as the original assumes. That length of time in an acid marinade is enough for a wild duck; much longer and the flesh turns mealy.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it: the birds go into the pan with the marinade and under buttered paper from the outset, so this is closer to a shallow braise than a dry roast.
- Timing and donenessWild ducks are small and lean. A mallard of 2 to 2 1/2 lb wants roughly 30 to 40 minutes total; teal and other small ducks far less. Modern practice takes the breast to about 135F and accepts it pink — cooked "done" all the way through, as the Victorians preferred, gives dry, livery meat.
- "Draw" and "divest of the string"In period usage 'draw' normally means to eviscerate, and some birds were cooked undrawn and drawn before serving; here, since the birds are washed inwardly at the start, the sense is unclear. Either way, remove the trussing string before dishing, since it will have tightened during cooking.
- Buttered paperA sheet of buttered parchment laid loosely over the breasts. Foil works but traps more steam; parchment keeps the skin from scorching while still letting the birds colour.
- Finishing the sauceLift out the birds, skim the fat, add a little strong stock or gravy and reduce over a gentle heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon. Keep it below a rolling boil so the sour cream holds together; strain out the marinade vegetables before serving.
- Shot and yieldWild-shot birds may carry pellets — feel over the breast before serving. Two ducks of mallard size serve four modestly, or two people generously.
Sour cream with game is the signature of Polish, Russian and Hungarian kitchens, where smetana does the work that butter and stock do in France, and where a cooked vinegar-and-wine marinade was a standard way to handle strong, dark-fleshed wildfowl before refrigeration. Cassell's, compiled in London in the later nineteenth century as a dictionary rather than a single cook's notebook, gathers national variants of common dishes under one heading, which is why "roast wild duck" appears here in several fashions; the "Polish" label in such books usually signals the marinade and the soured cream rather than any single documented regional recipe. The technique reflects the reality of game as it reached Victorian kitchens -- hung for some days, variable in age and toughness, and much improved by a spell in acid before it met the fire.