Duck, Wild, Hashed
INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 4 persons. The remains of cold roast wild duck, 1 pint of good brown gravy, 2 tablespoonfuls of breadcrumbs, 1 glass of claret, salt, cayenne, and mixed spices to taste; 1 tablespoonful of lemon or Seville orange-juice. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the duck, 10d.
Cut the remains of the duck into neat joints, put them into a stewpan, with all DUCK, WILD, ROAST. the above ingredients; let them get gradually hot by the side of the fire, and occasionally stir the contents; when on the point of boiling, serve, and garnish the dish with sippets of toasted bread.
TIME.-About hour.
SEASONABLE from November to February.
A reheating dish rather than a cooking one: the duck is already roasted, and the point is to warm it through in a spiced claret gravy without letting it boil and turn stringy.
- Never let it boilThe instruction to serve when it is "on the point of boiling" is the hinge. Already-roast wild duck is lean and will seize and dry out if it simmers; keep the pan at a bare shiver and serve as soon as the gravy trembles.
- QuantitiesA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups of gravy. A glass of claret in Beeton's measures is small, on the order of 2 fl oz of dry red wine. The joints of one carcass plus this much gravy will stretch to four only as part of a larger meal.
- "Good brown gravy"Beeton gives recipes for a brown gravy built on stock with a browned thickening, made ahead of time. Use a well-reduced dark stock thickened lightly with a brown roux, or the strained roasting juices let down with stock. A thin, salty commercial gravy will be swamped by the claret.
- Breadcrumbs as thickenerThe two tablespoons of crumbs are there to bind the sauce, not to add texture. Use dry, fine crumbs and give them a few minutes in the warm gravy to swell before judging the consistency.
- Mixed spicesVictorian "mixed spice" is the sweet baking blend: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, sometimes coriander and ginger. A pinch is enough against gamy duck; more and the dish reads as mince pie.
- Seville orangeSeville oranges are sour and available only briefly in midwinter, which is exactly the season given for the dish. Out of season, use lemon juice as the recipe permits, or a mix of orange and lemon juice to imitate the bitterness.
- TimingThe stated time is garbled in this printing; a quarter of an hour or so over low heat is enough, mostly to bring the joints up to temperature evenly. Stir now and then so the crumbs do not catch on the base of the pan.
- SippetsTriangles of bread toasted or fried in butter and tucked round the edge of the dish. They are functional as well as decorative, since the sauce is loose and there is no other starch in the dish.
Hashes like this one belong to the Victorian economy of the joint: a bird roasted on Sunday reappeared on Monday or Tuesday in a made dish, warmed through in a sauce that disguised the fact it was second-day meat. Beeton's costings make the logic explicit, pricing the dish at tenpence "exclusive of the duck" because the duck was already paid for. Wild duck, chiefly mallard and widgeon, was shot and marketed through the winter, and the entry is marked seasonable from November to February, though the shooting season itself opened well before then; claret and a sour orange were the standard Victorian foils for waterfowl, whose flesh was considered too rank for the plain gravy given to a tame duck. The mixed spices point further back still, to the older English habit of treating game with the same warm spicing used in sweet cookery.