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Roast Tame Duck
Prepare same as chicken; stuff with chopped celery.
Allow ten minutes to the pound for duckling and twenty for an old duck.
Two lines of instruction that assume a cook who already knows how to dress and roast a chicken. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the bird itself, and what the celery is actually for.
- The hinge: render the fatA duck carries a thick subcutaneous fat layer that a chicken does not. Prick the skin over the breast and thighs at intervals with a fork or skewer tip, angling so you pierce skin and fat but not flesh, and pour off the drippings once or twice during roasting. Skip this and the skin stays flabby and the pan smokes.
- "Prepare same as chicken"In cookery of this period that ordinarily meant singeing off hairs, drawing the bird, wiping it out, seasoning inside and out, and trussing before roasting. On a modern market duck the drawing is done for you; check the cavity for the neck and giblets and trim the loose flaps of fat at the vent.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the cook was expected to judge her range. Roast at 425F for the first 20 minutes to start the fat moving, then drop to 350F for the remainder. An unbroken high heat for a whole bird scorches the skin before the legs are done.
- The timing, checkedTen minutes to the pound puts a 5 lb Pekin duckling at about 50 minutes, which is brisk but workable at these temperatures. Trust a thermometer over the clock: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, away from bone, for a whole stuffed bird.
- "An old duck"Twenty minutes to the pound is for a mature bird with tougher connective tissue, something a household with a poultry yard would have had. Market ducks today are generally young birds, usually slaughtered at around seven to nine weeks, so the longer timing rarely applies.
- The celery stuffingThis reads as an aromatic rather than a dressing to be served. Coarsely chopped celery, to which some cooks add a quartered onion or a bay leaf, perfumes the cavity; it emerges limp and is usually discarded. Do not expect a bread dressing.
- YieldA duck is mostly frame and fat. A 5 lb bird serves three, four at a stretch; two ducks for six people is not extravagant.
- The drippingsStrain and refrigerate what you pour off. Duck fat keeps for months covered in the fridge and is the best thing going for roast potatoes.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a general household manual with a chocolate manufacturer's name on the spine, and its meat chapter runs on cross-references like this one: having explained roast chicken at length, it tells you a duck is the same bird with more fat and a different clock. The distinction between "duckling" and "an old duck" mattered in a period when many households either kept poultry or bought it live, and age was something you assessed yourself rather than read on a label. Celery in the cavity rather than a bread stuffing reflects the standing American view that duck is rich and needs cutting; the same logic gives us the apple, the orange and the onion, all traditional cavity fillers meant to be thrown away. Most ducks on the American table then, as now, were Pekins, descended from birds generally traced to a shipment brought from China to Long Island in the 1870s.