Roast Teal
Prepare for cooking as many ducks as desired, and cut off heads and feet. Put inside each bird a saltspoonful each of salt and pepper, and a tablespoonful of butter.
Put them in a dripping-pan with an onion, bake in a hot oven for twenty minutes, basting four or five times; add more butter if needed. While they are cooking, chop an onion fine, and put it in a tablespoonful of butter over the fire; when the butter browns, add a tablespoonful of flour; stir till smooth; when brown, pour in a pint of boiling water and port wine in equal parts; add a teaspoonful of salt and a saltspoonful pepper, and a dash of grated nutmeg; stir till the sauce boils, and pour in the dripping from the roasted birds. Season the birds with salt, and serve on a hot dish.
A short, fierce roast for very small wild ducks, with a browned-flour and port sauce built on the stovetop while the birds are in the oven. The timing assumes teal the size of a large pigeon, not a farmed Pekin.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon holds about a quarter teaspoon. The tablespoon of butter tucked in each cavity is a full modern tablespoon.what goes inside is seasoning, not stuffing.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; read "hot" as roughly 425-450F. The point is to colour and set the outside before the small amount of meat overcooks; a moderate oven for twenty minutes would leave the skin flabby.
- Twenty minutes means rareAt that heat a teal breast comes out pink to rare, which is how wild duck was and still is eaten. If you want the birds cooked through to 165F, as is advised for wild game birds, expect closer to 30-35 minutes and drier breast meat.
- Bird size and yieldA dressed teal runs roughly 6-12 oz depending on species, so allow one per light eater and two per hungry one. Larger wild ducks such as mallard need appreciably longer and will not suit this recipe as written.
- SourcingTeal is not sold in shops; it comes from a hunter, under season and bag limits. Small farmed ducks or duck breasts substitute reasonably, though the flesh is fatter and milder. Check any wild bird carefully for shot before serving.
- The sauce liquid"a pint of boiling water and port wine in equal parts" most likely means a pint in total, half of each, though it can also be read as a pint of each. Add the liquid to the browned roux gradually or it will lump.
- Brown the flour properlyThe onion and butter must go past golden and the flour must actually darken to the colour of a hazelnut shell before the liquid goes in. That toasted flavour is the backbone of the sauce; pale roux with port in it tastes raw and sweet.
- FinishingPour the pan drippings in at the end and do not boil the sauce hard afterwards. Straining it gives a cleaner result than leaving the chopped onion in. The onion roasted alongside the birds is there for the drippings and can be discarded.
Teal are the smallest of the North American dabbling ducks, and in this period they reached kitchens both from market gunners and from sport shooters, before the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the market-hunting bans reshaped what could legally be sold. That abundance may explain the offhand instruction to prepare "as many ducks as desired." The sauce is a straightforward brown roux lifted with port and nutmeg; fortified wine and a warm spice are a recurring pairing with the richness of wild waterfowl in Anglo-American game cookery of the period. The very short roast reflects a preference for underdone wild duck that modern food-safety guidance for game birds does not endorse.