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To Stew Ducks
Truss the ducks and stuff them with bread, butter, and onion. Flour them and brown them in lard. Have prepared slips of bacon, giblets, onion, water, pepper, salt, and a little clove or mace, if you like. Put in the ducks and let them stew gently but constantly for two hours. Then add the juice of green grapes or of a lemon, or else a little lemon pickle. Flour the ducks each time you turn them, and thicken with butter rolled in flour.--Mrs. Col. W.
A braise, not a roast: the ducks are browned, then held at a bare simmer in a covered pot with bacon, giblets and aromatics. The original gives no quantities and no pot size, so the cook is expected to judge by eye.
- Which duckA Virginia household of this period might well have been cooking wild ducks — mallard, canvasback, teal — which are lean, tough and well suited to two hours of stewing. A modern Pekin duck is fatty and much more tender, and will likely be done well before the two hours the recipe allows; the rendered fat should be skimmed before you thicken the sauce.
- Liquid is unmeasured"Onion, water, pepper, salt" gives no volume. Add enough water or stock to come roughly halfway up the birds; the recipe's instruction to turn and re-flour them suggests they are not meant to be submerged.
- Stew gently but constantlyThis is the hinge. A visible boil will shred the skin off the breasts and turn the flour-thickened liquid cloudy and pasty. Keep it at a lazy simmer with the lid on, on the stovetop or in a 300F oven.
- Lard for browningLard was a common frying fat in this kitchen tradition and still browns beautifully at high heat. Duck fat, or a neutral oil, does the same job.
- Green grape juice and lemon pickleThe juice of unripe grapes is verjuice, a sour cooking acid older than widespread lemons in American kitchens. Lemon pickle was a standing kitchen condiment of salted, spiced lemons steeped for weeks; a spoonful of the brine from preserved lemons is the nearest modern equivalent. Lemon juice, as the recipe allows, works.
- Butter rolled in flourSoft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, what a French kitchen calls beurre manié. Whisk it in in small pieces at the end and let the sauce simmer briefly so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Stuffing"Bread, butter, and onion" suggests a loose, moist dressing rather than a packed forcemeat. In a stew it will absorb liquid and swell, so do not pack the cavity full; truss so it stays put through the turning.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many ducks; a pair would serve about four if domestic, or two to three if they are small wild birds. Serve with the thickened pan sauce and something starchy — rice, hominy or mashed potato.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathers contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and the initialled attribution here — "Mrs. Col. W." — is typical of how the book credits its sources while preserving a degree of social discretion. Stewed rather than roasted duck belongs to a tradition of cooking wild fowl, which in the Chesapeake and along the James River was abundant in autumn and winter; long moist cooking with bacon and giblets was one common treatment for birds too lean or too old to roast well. The use of green grape juice points to a still older layer of English cookery, when verjuice was the workaday kitchen acid, and its appearance here alongside lemon and lemon pickle suggests that whatever sourness the season happened to supply might serve.