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Duck
Pick, singe and wipe outside. Salt and pepper the inside after carefully drawing and wiping out with a piece of old linen. Do not wash them. Cut off the wings at the second joint and truss the duck neatly. Roast in a very hot oven from fifteen to twenty minutes, in a baking pan containing a little water; baste frequently. Celery or onions, or apples, cored and quartered, are sometimes placed inside the duck to improve the flavor.
This is a game-bird method written for wild duck, and the short roasting time only makes sense in that light. A supermarket duck behaves completely differently.
- "A very hot oven"In period terms roughly 450-500F; the book gives no figure, and heat was judged by hand or by how quickly flour or paper browned in the oven. The aim is to sear the outside before the inside dries.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is a wild-duck timingMallard, teal and canvasback are lean, small and were served frankly rare. A domestic Pekin or Long Island duck of 5-6 lb needs 1.5-2 hours to render its fat layer and reach a safe internal temperature; USDA guidance is 165F in the thigh. Do not transfer this timing to a store-bought bird.
- Pick, singe, drawPicking is plucking; singeing burns off remaining down and pinfeathers over a flame; drawing is removing the viscera. A dressed bird from a butcher or supermarket has all of this done.
- "Do not wash them"Modern food-safety advice has come back around to this. Rinsing poultry aerosolises bacteria across the sink and worktop; wiping with a damp cloth or paper and drying well is the better practice.
- Basting and the pan of waterUseful for a lean wild bird. A fatty domestic duck bastes itself and does better on a rack over a dry pan, with the skin pricked so the fat runs off rather than steaming the bird in its own liquid.
- The aromatics are not stuffingCelery, onion or quartered apple in the cavity are there to perfume the flesh and are discarded. They will not be safe or pleasant to eat after a short roast.
- TrussingTie the legs together and the wings against the body with kitchen string so the bird holds its shape and cooks evenly. Cutting the wings at the second joint removes the thin tips that would otherwise char.
- YieldA wild duck serves one to two; a domestic duck of 5-6 lb serves three to four once the heavy bone and fat are accounted for.
Duck in a cookbook of this kind usually meant a bird that had been shot rather than raised, and market stalls sold wild fowl by the brace alongside quail, snipe and plover. Canvasback, fattened on wild celery in the Chesapeake, commanded the highest prices and was conventionally served very rare, which is why an instruction as brief as fifteen to twenty minutes could sit unremarked in a household manual. The apple, onion or celery tucked into the cavity is traditionally said to temper the muddy, fishy note that wild ducks can carry depending on what they have been feeding on. Domestic ducks of the Pekin type, brought to Long Island from China in the 1870s, gradually displaced game on the American table, and with them came the long, slow roasting now associated with the word duck.