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Wild Duck, Teal, and Widgeon
These birds are in season from September to February. Clean, singe, and truss for roasting.
Brush the birds over with melted butter, and roast before a quick fire for twenty to thirty minutes, basting well all the time. Serve with watercress and lemon. Hand Bigarade sauce.
A spit-roasting instruction written for an open fire, and the timings assume the birds come to the table pink. The three birds named here are very different sizes, which the original does not tell you.
- "A quick fire" in an ovenThe original means an open fire with the bird turning on a spit in front of it. The book gives no temperature; the nearest modern equivalent is a very hot oven, in the region of 425-450F, with the bird on a rack over a tray to catch the drippings for basting. High heat and short time are the point: wildfowl has little fat to render and dries out at moderate temperatures.
- Size the timing to the birdTwenty to thirty minutes suits a mallard-sized wild duck. Teal are a third of the size and need roughly 10-15 minutes; widgeon sit between the two. Judge by the breast, not the clock.
- DonenessWild duck is traditionally served rare to medium-rare in the breast, which is what these timings deliver. That is a settled culinary convention for whole wildfowl, but it is not a pathogen-free preparation in the way a chicken cooked to 165F is. Anyone cooking for the very young, the elderly, the pregnant or the immunocompromised should cook it through and accept the dryness.
- ShotBirds from a shoot may still carry pellets. Feel along the breast before roasting and warn whoever is eating. Lead shot is now restricted or banned for wildfowling in much of Britain, Europe and the United States, but older birds and older habits vary.
- Bigarade sauceA brown sauce finished with the juice and blanched shredded zest of bitter Seville oranges, sharpened with a little caramel or vinegar. Seville oranges are available only for a few weeks in midwinter; sweet orange juice cut with lemon is the usual substitute, though it will be rounder and less bracing.
- BastingThere is little fat under the skin, so the melted butter is doing all the work. Baste every five minutes or so, and add more butter to the tray if it dries out.
- Rest and carveGive the bird five to ten minutes off the heat before carving; the breasts firm up and stop bleeding into the plate. Carve the breasts off whole and slice them on the diagonal.
- YieldOne teal per person, one widgeon between one and two, one mallard-sized duck for two. The legs of wild duck are tough and are often kept back for a stew or a stock rather than served.
- SeasonThe September-to-February window is the old British wildfowling season, and it still roughly holds. Which species may be taken, and when, is set by current law and differs by country; a bird bought from a game dealer settles the question.
Wild duck was often said to be among the standard game-book roasts in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: quick before the fire, served rare with something sharp alongside to cut the richness. Bigarade is the French word for the bitter Seville orange, and sauce bigarade with duck is generally traced as the ancestor of the caneton a l'orange that spread through hotel dining rooms in the twentieth century, though the older version is markedly less sweet. Teal and widgeon appear in the same entry, and a book of this kind assumes the cook knows to adjust for a bird a third the size without being told. The watercress and lemon are not garnish for its own sake but the standard accompaniment to a roast game bird, the peppery leaves and the acid answering the fat and the strong, liverish flavour of wildfowl.