Home › D › Duck, to Ragout a Whole
Duck, to Ragout a Whole
INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 4 persons.-1 large duck, pepper and salt to taste, good beef gravy, 2 onions sliced, 4 sage-leaves, a few leaves of lemon thyme, thickening of butter and flour. AVERAGE CosT, 3s. 6d.
After having emptied and singed the duck, season it inside with pepper and salt, and truss it. Roast it before a clear fire for about 20 minutes, and let it acquire a nice brown colour. Put it into a stewpan with sufficient well-seasoned beef gravy to cover it; slice and fry the onions, and add these, with the sageleaves and lemon thyme, both of which should be finely minced, to the stock.
Simmer gently until the duck is tender; strain, skim, and thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour; boil it up, pour over the duck and serve. When in season, about 1½ pint of young green peas, boiled separately, and put in the ragout, very much improve this dish.
TIME.-20 minutes to roast the duck; 20 minutes to stew it.
SEASONABLE from November to February; ducklings from April to August.
A two-stage dish: the duck is browned on a spit, then finished in seasoned stock. The stated stewing time is the one number worth ignoring.
- The hinge: stewing timeTwenty minutes of gentle simmering will not make a full-grown duck tender, whatever the original says. Expect 1 to 1½ hours for a mature bird, less for a young duckling, and test the leg meat rather than the clock.
- Roasting before a fireThe initial 20 minutes in front of a clear fire is for colour, not for cooking through. A very hot oven, or browning the bird in a wide pan in its own fat, does the same job; the original gives no oven setting to convert.
- "Good beef gravy"Here it means a well-seasoned brown stock rather than the thickened sauce sold under that name today: the recipe adds its own thickening at the end. Use enough to cover a large duck in a close-fitting stewpan, which will be several pints.
- Skim seriouslyA duck releases a great deal of fat into the stock. The instruction to strain and skim is doing most of the work of turning stewing liquid into sauce; chilling the strained liquid briefly makes the fat easy to lift.
- Thickening of butter and flourEqual weights kneaded cold and whisked into the boiling liquid, about 1 oz of each per pint of sauce. It must boil up afterwards or the flour will taste raw.
- Lemon thymeCommon in Victorian kitchen gardens, less so in shops. Ordinary thyme with a strip of lemon zest is a fair stand-in; use it sparingly, as four sage leaves and a little thyme are meant to sit behind the duck, not in front of it.
- The peasIt is unclear whether the pint and a half is measured in the pod or shelled; judge by eye rather than by weight. Frozen petits pois, boiled separately and added at the end so they keep their colour, are a reasonable stand-in for young garden peas.
- YieldFour is optimistic by modern portions unless the duck is genuinely large; one 5 lb bird with peas and gravy serves three comfortably. The cost of 3s 6d is a period note only.
Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by the mid-nineteenth century the word had settled in English cookery to mean meat stewed in a well-flavoured, thickened gravy. What is slightly unusual here is that the duck is ragouted whole rather than jointed, which puts the dish halfway between a roast and a stew, and explains the odd two-stage method: the fire gives the skin its colour, the stewpan gives the flesh its tenderness. The seasonal note is worth reading closely, since it marks the difference between the mature table ducks of the winter months and the tender ducklings of spring and summer, the sort raised in quantity around Aylesbury and sent to London by rail. A slow braise in beef gravy with onion, sage and thyme is the treatment a tougher winter bird needs; a duckling would barely require it, which is presumably why the peas are offered as a summer improvement.