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Sippets of Bread
Remove the backbone from a large-sized duckling, lay it out flat, and take out the other bones, have ready some veal forcemeat (as below), spread the stuffing over every hollow place of the inside of the duck, lay a few strips of raw ham in between the forcemeat, tie or sew up the duckling with strings. Put a few slices of bacon at the bottom of a deep sauté-pan, with a small bouquet garni, and a few slices of onion; lay the duckling in the pan, season with pepper and salt, moisten with a little stock, and put it in a moderate oven for about an hour or more until tender, basting it from time to time; take it up and keep it warm. Take out the bacon and onion from the sauté-pan, add half a pint of Madeira sauce and a tablespoonful of tomato sauce, let all simmer for a few minutes, and pass through a tammy cloth. Cut the duckling into neat slices, dish it up in an oblong entrée dish, garnish the sides with alternate groups of cooked green peas, young carrots and turnips (scooped out) and a few sippets of bread, pour the sauce over it carefully, and serve.
A boned, stuffed and braised duckling served as a hot entrée — the title and the "Fish" heading are artefacts of the book's indexing, not of the dish. A few things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The hinge: bone it, but keep the skin wholeThe whole dish depends on removing the frame through the back without piercing the breast skin, so the bird can be re-tied into a solid roll that slices cleanly. Work with a small flexible knife, keeping the blade scraping against bone rather than cutting toward the skin, and ask a butcher to do it if the prospect is daunting.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally read as about 350F/175C. The recipe gives "about an hour or more until tender," so treat time as open-ended and baste as directed; the stuffing should reach 165F/74C at the centre, which is the real test rather than the clock.
- The veal forcemeat "as below"The cross-reference is to a forcemeat recipe not reproduced in the text given here. Any standard veal forcemeat — lean veal and pork fat pounded or ground fine, bound with panada or egg, seasoned with salt, pepper and mace — will do.
- Sauté-pan means braising panA deep sauté-pan here is a wide, deep oven-going pan able to hold the tied bird along with the bacon, aromatics and stock. No lid is specified, and the bird is basted during cooking. The bacon slices are taken out with the onion before the sauce is made, not eaten.
- Madeira sauceHalf a pint in a British book is 10 fl oz, about 1.25 US cups. Period Madeira sauce is a reduced brown sauce — espagnole or a well-reduced veal stock — finished with Madeira. A good reduced duck or veal stock with a generous splash of dry Madeira gets you there.
- Tammy clothA tammy was a worsted straining cloth wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois, or a fine sieve lined with muslin, does the same job alone.
- The scooped vegetables"Scooped out" carrots and turnips are cut with a parisienne or melon baller into small spheres, then boiled or glazed separately and grouped in alternating heaps around the dish. This is presentation, not flavour, and can be simplified to neat batons without loss.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp. Add them at the last moment and keep the sauce off them, or they go sodden before the dish reaches the table.
- YieldNo yield is given. A duckling boned and stuffed this way slices into portions for four, five at a stretch as part of a longer menu.
The technique here is essentially that of the ballotine: a bird boned, stuffed, re-formed and braised, then sliced — generally distinguished from the galantine, which is poached and served cold in its jelly, though the two terms are used loosely in period sources. It belongs to the professional French repertoire that British "high class" cookery books of the late nineteenth century were transcribing for private-house cooks, complete with its bouquet garni, its tammy cloth and its Madeira sauce built on espagnole. "Sippet" is a diminutive related to sop, a small piece of bread served with liquid, and by the Victorian period it had been reduced to a fried or toasted garnish rather than the substantial bread base that once sat under medieval and Tudor dishes.