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Duck with Orange
1 onion 1 carrot (good sized) 1 stalk celery 3 cups veal stock Juice of 1 orange 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons currant jelly 1 teaspoon arrow root 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper Slice onion, carrot, celery. Place duck on top of these vegetables; add veal stock, and cook for about 1 hour or until duck is tender. When duck has been cooked 1/2 hour season to taste. When duck is cooked, remove from pan and strain gravy. Put gravy on fire and skim off fat; add the juice of orange, lemon and currant jelly thickened with arrow root. Cut the rind of 3 oranges and 1 lemon into julienne strips and cook for 5 minutes in boiling water, then strain and add them to sauce. Duck may be browned in hot oven. Cover the duck with sliced oranges and coat all with sauce and serve. Decorate platter with fancy orange baskets. Allow 1 pound of raw duck to a serving.
A braised rather than roasted duck, in the classic bigarade manner: the bird is stewed on a bed of aromatics in veal stock, and the strained liquid becomes the sauce. A few of the quantities and steps need translating.
- Size the birdThe serving note — one pound of raw duck per person — is the only guide to quantity given. A standard 5 lb Pekin duck serves four to five by that arithmetic, and fits a Dutch oven set on the sliced vegetables.
- Braise, don't submergeThree cups of stock in a close-fitting pot reaches partway up the duck, which is what is wanted. The legs need roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; an hour is optimistic for a bird much over 4 lb.
- Brown first, not lastThe line "duck may be browned in hot oven" is the difference between a handsome dish and a pallid one. The book gives no temperature; a hot oven of this period is generally taken as somewhere around 425-450F. Browning the duck for 20 minutes at that heat before braising also renders out a good deal of fat, and the skin can be crisped again at that heat after the braise while the sauce is finished.
- Skim seriouslyDuck throws a great deal of fat into the braising liquid. Strain, let it settle for several minutes, and lift the fat off completely before adding the fruit juices — unskimmed, the sauce will never take on the clean sharp edge it depends on.
- Arrowroot handlingSlake the teaspoon of arrowroot in a spoonful of cold water, stir it into the simmering sauce, and take the pan off the heat as soon as it thickens. Arrowroot thins again if boiled hard, and it will not reheat well; make the sauce at the last.
- The peelPare the zest with no white pith attached, cut it into fine julienne, and blanch as directed. Five minutes in boiling water is a short blanch — taste a strip, and give it a second change of water if it is still bitter.
- SeasoningA teaspoon each of salt and pepper is a lot of pepper for three cups of sauce. Season the braise lightly, as the instruction to "season to taste" halfway through suggests, and correct at the end when the liquid has reduced and the jelly has gone in.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not jam. Two tablespoons is there to balance the orange and lemon rather than to sweeten the dish outright.
Duck with orange in this form is a French restaurant preparation — canard à l'orange, descended from sauce bigarade, named for the bitter Seville-type orange whose juice and peel originally gave the dish its edge. The technique here — braising the bird on a mirepoix in veal stock and building the sauce from the strained liquor — is one of the hotel-kitchen approaches; the roast-and-deglaze version is the one most home cooks know today. A duck glazed with sauce, ringed with orange slices and flanked by carved orange baskets looked expensive and read as Continental. The garnish instruction, offered without explanation, assumes a cook who already knew how to cut a fancy basket from citrus rind.