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Wild Fowl, Roast
It is an old and true figurative saying that a wild duck to be properly roasted should only walk through the kitchen, that the widgeon should run gently through, but that the teal scould scamper through. All these birds must therefore be very little done. If they are of a kind that is usually impregnated with a fishy flavour, which is most inveterate when they are not fat, they should be soaked in and rubbed with a little tarragon vinegar a few hours prior to being put upon the spit. The sauce for wild fowl is served, not in the dish, but in a tureen. It is thus made. Put into a saucepan a quarter of a pint of port wine, the same quantity of meat gravy, two or three shallots, a bit of mace, pepper and salt according to taste, and a dash of cayenne. Let it simmer ten minutes, then squeeze into it the juice of half a lemon, and thicken it with butter rolled in flour.
The whole point of the entry is the timing, and the sauce is a plain port reduction that still works. Both need translating from spit-roasting to an oven.
- The hinge: cook it barely, then rest itWild duck has almost no intramuscular fat, so the window between rare and dry is very short. In a preheated 450-475F oven a mallard wants roughly 15-18 minutes, a widgeon 12-14, a teal 8-10, followed by 10 minutes' rest under foil - which is the modern equivalent of the walk, the gentle run and the scamper.
- Doneness and the safety trade-offServed this way the breast will read 125-135F at the thickest point, well under the 165F recommended for poultry. Rare wild duck is long-established practice, but it is a genuine trade-off; anyone feeding the very young, the elderly, the pregnant or the immunocompromised should cook the bird through and accept the dryness.
- ShotBirds that have been shot carry pellets and the occasional shattered bone. Feel through the breast before roasting and warn people at the table, and discard flesh badly bruised around a wound channel.
- "A quarter of a pint"An imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, so a generous half cup of port and the same of gravy. The finished sauce is a small quantity, deliberately - it is a seasoning, not a gravy for pouring freely.
- "Meat gravy"Not thickened pan gravy but strong brown stock, close to what a modern kitchen would call reduced veal or game stock, or a spoon of demi-glace let down with water. Chicken stock alone is too thin to stand up to the port.
- Mace and shallots"A bit of mace" means a blade of the dried aril, not the ground spice, though a small pinch of ground mace substitutes. Leave the shallots whole or halved and strain the sauce before it goes into the tureen.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manie, butter and flour worked to a paste in roughly equal weights, about a tablespoon of each here. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then bring the sauce back just to a simmer to cook out the raw flour.
- The fishy birdsThe problem is real in sea ducks - scoter, eider, old squaw - whose diet is shellfish, and largely absent in mallard, teal and widgeon off grain or freshwater weed. A few hours in tarragon vinegar helps; removing the skin and any subcutaneous fat helps more, since that is where the off flavour concentrates.
- YieldReckon one teal per person, a widgeon for one or two, a mallard for two. The sauce as written serves four.
The saying about the duck walking, the widgeon running and the teal scampering through the kitchen circulated widely in nineteenth-century sporting and cookery writing, and it is generally treated as an old shooting-field proverb rather than traced to any one author. Its practical sense holds: the leaner and smaller the bird, the less heat it will take. Roast wild fowl belonged to the autumn and winter game season, when British birds arrived at the house from the marshes by the brace, and this port-and-shallot sauce, sharpened with lemon and cayenne, went with them. Serving it in a tureen rather than under the bird is not fussiness - the sauce would soften the skin, and a rare-roasted duck is carved dry so the eater can dress each slice. Tarragon vinegar belonged to a period that pickled and infused vinegars as a matter of course.