Wild Duck
Roast wild ducks, cut in joints, are served as- Canards, or Canetons, sauvages en salmis, with a salmis sauce. à la bigarade with bigarade sauce. à la Muette-in a rich salmis sauce with wine and truffles.
The fillets as- Filets de canetons sauvages au fumet de gibier are served with fumet of game sauce. à l'essence-served with a brown game sauce, port wine, shallots, etc. à la Syrienne-dressed alternately with slices of fried bread spread in a dome shape with the livers with butter, etc.; served with brown game sauce and olives.
TEAL.
Teal are dressed in the same way as wild ducks; also as- Sarcelles à la purée de champignons-cut in joints and arranged in a circle with a purée of mushrooms in the centre; served with a macédoine garnish, they are called à la macédoine.
Wild duck and teal, in a dozen lines. Almost every entry uses one method, and the reason is arithmetic: these are small birds and there is not much on them.
- A wild duck is small and leanA mallard dresses out at a fraction of the weight of the farmed duck sold now and carries almost none of its fat. Everything here is written for dark lean meat that is overdone in minutes, not for a fatty bird that needs its skin rendered.
- Salmis is a two-stage dishEn salmis means the bird is roasted underdone, the joints are taken off, and the carcass is pounded and simmered into the sauce that finishes them. One small duck will not feed several people as joints, but it will as joints in a sauce made of itself.
- Bigarade is a bitter orangeÀ la bigarade is sauced with the juice and peel of the bitter Seville-type orange, not the sweet one. Duck with bitter orange is this dish; sweet orange juice makes something quite different and much flatter.
- Teal are much smallerThe page says teal are dressed like wild duck and then gives them an arrangement of their own, the joints set in a circle round a mushroom purée. A teal is a one-person bird, which is why it is presented in company on a dish rather than carved.
- Lead shot is in the fleshBirds shot with lead carry fragments through the meat, not only at the wound. Official advice in Britain is to limit how much lead-shot game is eaten, and to be particularly careful with children and in pregnancy. The book has no reason to raise it and does not.
- Fumet and essenceBoth mean a game reduction concentrated until a spoonful will flavour a dish, fumet the lighter infusion and essence the harder reduction. Both begin with bones and trimmings, and neither has ever been on sale.
Wild duck arrives through the gun rather than the butcher, and this short page says a good deal about the household that used it. Somebody shot, somebody plucked, and the kitchen had to deal with a handful of small birds of unknown age at an evening’s notice. Notice what the page never supplies: no hanging time, no weight, no cooking time, nothing about age or condition. The cook was expected to judge all of it from the bird in her hand, and the book is silent because there was nothing general to say. Notice too that the fillets get treatments of their own, listed separately from the whole bird. That is a division by quality rather than by method. The breast fillets went to the dining room dressed with game essence and port; the legs, the back and the carcass went into the salmis, and on a bird this size that decision was the difference between one good dish and two indifferent ones.