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Wild Duck, with Oranges
An orange salad is one of the best adjuncts to a wild duck when nicely roasted (see ORANGE SALAD). A good brown gravy should be served also, well flavoured with orange juice and port, about half a gill of each to a pint of gravy; a thickening of roux should be added and a bit of glaze.
This is really a sauce and garnish note rather than a full roasting method: Cassell's assumes you know how to roast the bird and tells you what to put beside it. The measurable part is the gravy.
- Half a gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2½ fl oz, a scant third of a US cup. Into a pint of gravy — 20 imperial fl oz, roughly 2½ US cups — that is a fairly assertive amount of both orange juice and port.
- GlazeNot a sugar glaze. Victorian kitchens kept glace de viande, brown stock reduced to a syrup that set solid when cold; a knife-tip of it was cut off to enrich a sauce. A spoonful of good demi-glace, or stock reduced hard, does the same job.
- RouxA brown roux, cooked to the colour of a hazelnut before the liquid goes in. Only enough to give the sauce body — this should coat a spoon thinly, not blanket the meat.
- Order of operationsAdd the orange juice and port near the end and let them simmer only briefly. Boiled hard, the juice turns bitter and the port loses its fruit, leaving the sauce flat and slightly harsh.
- The orangesSeville and other bitter oranges were available in Britain when this was written, though sweet oranges were common too and Cassell's does not say which is meant. If the juice of a modern sweet navel tastes thin here, cut it with lemon or add a strip of zest to the gravy.
- Sourcing the birdWild duck cannot be bought commercially in the United States; it comes from a hunter or not at all. Farmed mallard or a small Pekin duck will take the same sauce, though the flesh is fattier and much milder than the wild bird Cassell's had in mind.
- RoastingCassell's gives no roasting instructions here; it assumes you know them. Wild duck is lean and was generally served underdone. Modern practice is a short spell in a hot oven, roughly twenty to thirty minutes for a mallard. Cooked right through, a whole wild duck tends to go dry and livery. Farmed duck is usually taken further.
- ShotA shot bird may carry lead pellets and bruised, blood-shot flesh around the wound channel. Feel the breast before cooking and cut away damaged tissue.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of gravy is a generous quantity for a brace of ducks. Scale the port and juice proportionally rather than making a small quantity of over-flavoured sauce.
Duck with orange is older and broader than the French canard à l'orange that eventually swallowed the whole idea: bitter oranges were a standard sauce acid across late medieval and early modern Europe, sharpening rich meats in the same role vinegar or verjuice played elsewhere. In Britain the pairing attached itself particularly to wild duck, whose dark, close-grained flesh takes acidity well. Cassell's treats the combination as too obvious to belabour — the entry is a cross-reference to the orange salad and a formula for the gravy, aimed at a cook who already roasts game as a matter of course. The port and meat glaze are the Victorian signature; the same sauce a century earlier would more likely have been thickened with nothing at all and sharpened with the juice of a Seville orange alone.