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Duck, Wild, Ragout of
INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 6 persons.-2 wild ducks, 4 shalots, 1 pint of stock (see STOCK), 1 glass of port wine, 1 oz. of butter, a little flour, the juice of 1/21 lemon, cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 58. INGREDIENTS for dish sufficient for 6 persons.—2 wild ducks, 4 shalots, 1 pint of stock (see STOCK), 1 glass of port wine, 1 oz. of butter, a little flour, the juice of 1/2 lemon, cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 5s.
Ducks that have been dressed and left from the preceding day will answer for this dish. Cut them into joints, reserve the legs, wings, and breasts until wanted; put the trimmings into a stewpan with the shalots and stock, and let them simmer for about 1/2 hour, and strain the gravy. Put the butter into a stewpan; when melted, dredge in a little flour, and pour in the gravy made from the bones; give it one boil, and strain it again; add the wine, lemon-juice, and cayenne; lay in the pieces of duck, and let the whole gradually warm through, but do not allow it to boil, or the duck will be hard. The gravy should not be too thick, and should be very highly seasoned. The squeeze of a Seville orange is a great improvement to this dish.
Time.-About 1/2 hour to make the gravy hour for the duck gradually to warm through.
SEASONABLE from November to February.
A Victorian second-day dish: cold roast wild duck reheated in a sharp, port-laced gravy built from its own bones. Nearly everything depends on keeping the sauce below a simmer once the meat goes in.
- The hingeOnce the joints are in the gravy, keep the pan well below a simmer (around 160-170F) and never let it boil. Wild duck is lean and already cooked, and boiling will toughen it, as the recipe warns. A short, gentle warming through is all that is wanted; the recipe's own timing for this stage is a fraction of an hour, illegible in this copy.
- Getting wild duckGenuinely wild-shot duck is not sold in the United States; it comes from a hunter. Farm-raised mallard, sold as such, is the usual substitute. A mallard dresses out at roughly 1.5-2 lb and is dark, lean and faintly livery. A domestic duck will stand in, but skim more fat from the gravy and expect a milder flavour.
- ShalotsShalots are shallots. Four is roughly 3-4 oz peeled; chop them roughly since the gravy is strained twice.
- A glass of portIn Mrs Beeton's kitchen a wine glass is about 2 fl oz, not a modern tumbler. Use a ruby or tawny port; the sauce is meant to be sharp and highly seasoned, not sweet.
- StockA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, so measure 2.5 cups. Use a good brown poultry or veal stock; a weak stock will not carry the port and lemon.
- Seville orangeThe bitter Seville is in season roughly January and February and is worth seeking out for this. Outside those weeks, a mix of regular orange juice with extra lemon approximates the sourness, though not the perfume.
- The two strainingsStraining after the trimmings simmer, then again after the roux is loosened, keeps the gravy clear. Resist thickening further: the recipe says only that the gravy should not be too thick.
- YieldThe recipe claims six. Two wild ducks yield perhaps a pound and a half of picked meat at most, which would stretch to six only as part of a larger meal; as a main course with potatoes and a green vegetable, four is a safer count.
Ragout entries like this one are the practical heart of Victorian household cookery: the roast is the display dish, and the ragout is what the same bird becomes on Tuesday. Wild duck was seasonal game, listed here for November to February, and the trimmings-into-stewpan method squeezes a second meal from carcasses that a modern kitchen would simply discard. The port, cayenne and citrus are all doing the same job, cutting the strong, slightly fishy tang that wild waterfowl can carry from a diet of weed and shellfish; the pairing of duck with bitter orange is often traced to English and French cooking, though the lineage is disputed and a rival Italian tradition is claimed, and it survives today in bigarade sauce. The instruction that the gravy be "very highly seasoned" reflects a general nineteenth-century view that reheated meat needs a louder sauce than fresh.