Wild Duck
Roasted Canvasback or Redhead The heads of wild duck are usually left on when cooked. Make a slit in front of the wishbone. Clean the bird; remove entrails, crop and windpipe; draw the head through the neck opening. Truss, sprinkle with salt and pepper inside and outside. Bake in a very hot oven eighteen to twenty minutes, basting with hot water during cooking. If the strong flavor of wild duck is objectionable, cook an onion or an apple in the cavity, removing it before serving.
Serve with the wild duck, fried crescents of rice or hominy and currant jelly.
Ruddy Duck, Butterballs, Bluebills, Broadbills, Teals, Coot, Grouse, Partridge, Prairie Chicken, Quail, Woodcock, Reedbirds and Pheasants are roasted in the same way as Wild Duck, or are broiled the same as Broiled Chicken. The small birds are usually served on pieces of buttered toast and garnished with water cress, parsley, and a highly seasoned sauce.
A market-gunning-era treatment of wild waterfowl, written when ducks were sold by the barrel and cooked barely past raw. Two things need translating: the oven and the list of birds.
- "A very hot oven"In period usage this is usually rendered as roughly 450-500F. The method depends on searing a lean bird fast; a moderate oven is likelier to give grey, dry meat than a tender one.
- Eighteen to twenty minutes means rareEighteen to twenty minutes at that heat leaves the breast red at the bone. Rare breast is the conventional treatment for canvasback, redhead and teal, though the recipe itself says nothing about doneness. If that is not acceptable to you, cook the legs and thighs separately rather than extending the roast, since the whole bird cooked through tends to be tough and livery.
- Reedbirds and other songbirds"reedbird" meant chiefly bobolink, and sometimes sora rail; either way these have been off the table in the United States since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Ignore that part of the list. Woodcock, coot, quail, grouse and the ducks named remain legal game in season, with bag limits and state-by-state variation; wild-taken migratory game birds cannot legally be sold, so the birds must be your own or a licensed hunter's.
- Head on, and drawing through the neckThe slit in front of the wishbone is how you get the crop and windpipe out without opening the breast; the head is then drawn through and held in place by the trussing. Practical for a plucked bird in 1907, purely decorative now, and nothing is lost by removing it.
- Basting with hot waterOdd to modern eyes, but it moistens the skin in a fierce oven without adding fat. Melted butter or the pan drippings do the job better and will brown the skin more.
- ShotAny bird taken with a shotgun carries pellets and bruised, blood-shot tissue. Trim the damaged flesh and warn whoever is eating, particularly with the small birds served whole on toast.
- The garnishes"Fried crescents of rice or hominy" are stiff cooked rice or hominy grits, spread and chilled in a pan, cut with a cutter and fried. Currant jelly is the standard sharp-sweet foil for dark game and is worth keeping.
- YieldA canvasback or redhead serves one person generously, two at a stretch. Teal, quail and woodcock are one bird per person at least.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains the book's heavy cocoa chapters and its otherwise conventional American range. This page belongs to the last years in which wild duck was an ordinary market purchase rather than a hunter's private trophy. Canvasback was the prestige bird, its reputation built on the wild celery beds of Chesapeake Bay, and Baltimore hotels charged accordingly; redhead was the near substitute, often passed off as canvasback. Commercial gunning on that scale ended with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the federal ban on the sale of migratory game birds, which is why a list that once read as a shopping guide now reads as a record of what has since been protected. The instruction to stuff the cavity with an onion or apple, then throw it out, was the period's usual answer to a rank-tasting bird.