Wild Duck
When the duck is ready dressed, put in it a small onion, pepper, salt, and a spoonful of red wine. Lay in a pan with water enough to make the gravy. Cook in fifteen or twenty minutes, if the fire is brisk. Serve with gravy made as for wild turkey.
Canvas-back ducks are cooked in the same way, only you leave on their heads and do not use onion with them.--Mrs. R. L. O.
To Cook Wild Duck for Breakfast.
Split open in the back, put in a pan with a little water, butter, pepper and salt, and cook till tender. Baste with flour. If for dinner, cook whole.--Mrs.
Two short methods for wild duck: fast roasting in a hot oven, and a split-and-braise version for breakfast. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what a plucked duck looks like and how hot her fire is, so most of the work here is filling in numbers.
- "A brisk fire" is 450-500F"A brisk fire" means a very hot one -- fifteen to twenty minutes only makes sense at high heat, and that is how wild duck is still handled: high heat, short time, breast left rosy. The book gives no temperature, so any oven figure is a modern approximation; in a moderate oven the same bird would emerge grey and dry.
- The hinge: do not cook it throughWild ducks have almost no intramuscular fat, and their breast meat behaves like lean red meat rather than chicken. Past medium it turns liver-flavoured and tough. If you want a temperature, mallard and pintail breast is generally taken to 130-135F and rested; the legs need much longer and are usually treated separately.
- "Ready dressed"Plucked, singed, drawn, and wiped out. Where a bird has been breasted out rather than kept whole, the onion-and-wine stuffing has nowhere to go and the timing drops to a few minutes per side in a skillet.
- You cannot buy this birdCommercial sale of wild waterfowl in the United States ended with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; wild duck now comes only from a licensed hunter. Farmed Pekin or Muscovy duck is fattier and needs longer, gentler cooking, so the fifteen-minute rule does not transfer.
- Check for shotAny hunted bird may carry pellets and bruised, blood-shot flesh around the wound channel. Trim that away before cooking; it is bitter and it is where any grit will be.
- A spoonful of red wineBest read as a tablespoon. It flavours the cavity along with the onion; both would normally be discarded rather than served.
- "Water enough to make the gravy"Only enough to film the bottom of the pan; deeper water steams the underside of the bird and stops the skin browning. The pan liquid is then finished following the book's wild turkey gravy.
- "Baste with flour"Most likely means dredge: dusting the wet, buttered bird with flour so it forms a crust as it cooks.
- YieldA mallard or canvasback serves two modestly or one generously; teal and wood duck are one bird per person. The breakfast method, split down the back, is what would now be called spatchcocking.
- Why the heads stay onHead-on presentation was the usual way canvasback was sent to table and to market, and it is often explained as a guarantee of species as well as a mark of quality. The prohibition on onion looks like a flavour judgement rather than a rule of cookery: canvasback fed on wild celery was reckoned too fine to mask.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, appeared at the height of the Chesapeake's reputation for wild fowl. The canvasback singled out here was the most valuable duck in nineteenth-century America, prized because it fed on the roots of wild celery (Vallisneria americana) in the brackish flats of the upper Bay, a diet said to give the flesh a sweet, nutty character that cooks were warned not to mask. Market hunters shipped Chesapeake canvasback to hotels in Baltimore, Washington and New York, where it commanded prices no domestic fowl could touch, and the bird's presence on a Virginia table said something about both the season and the household. That trade collapsed twice over: the wild celery beds declined sharply in the twentieth century, and the sale of wild waterfowl was outlawed outright, so a recipe that once assumed a brace of ducks on hand now belongs entirely to hunters. The two treatments given, one for dinner and one split open for breakfast, are a reminder that game was eaten at every meal in a house where it arrived by the dozen.