Widgeon, Roast
INGREDIENTS.- Widgeons, a little flour, butter. AVERAGE COST, 1s. each.
These are trussed in the same manner as wild duck, but must not be kept so long before they are dressed. Put them down to a brisk fire; flour, and baste them con- WINE SAUCE. tinually with butter, and, when browned and nicely frothed, send them to table hot and quickly. Serve with brown gravy, or orange gravy, and a cut lemon.
TIME- hour; if liked well done, 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from October to February.
A spit-roasting recipe for a small wild duck, printed with its timings mangled by the scanner and with a stray heading from the neighbouring "Wine Sauce" entry bleeding into the ingredient line. The method is sound; the mechanics need translating.
- The garbled timesThe original reads "TIME- hour; if liked well done, 20 minutes." The missing fraction is almost certainly a quarter: roughly 15 minutes for pink flesh, 20 for well done.
- A brisk fire means a very hot ovenA brisk fire means a very hot fire -- "Put them down to a brisk fire" describes a bird on a spit before an open blaze. The book gives no oven setting; if adapting, use a very hot oven with the bird raised on a rack so the heat circulates underneath.
- Frothing"Nicely frothed" is the Victorian finish for game birds: flour dusted on, butter basted over, and the two catching in a blistered golden crust in the last few minutes. It only works at high heat and only if you baste often.
- Sourcing the birdWigeon is a legally hunted migratory duck, but in the United States the sale of wild waterfowl is prohibited, so a shot bird comes from a hunter rather than a butcher. In the UK wild wigeon is sold in season by game dealers. A small farmed duck (mallard) is the nearest substitute.
- Check for shotAny wild-shot bird may carry pellets and bruised, blood-shot flesh around the wound channel. Run a finger over the breast before trussing and trim damaged tissue.
- DonenessBeeton assumes rare breast, which is still standard practice for wild duck; the legs, being tougher and darker, are often removed and cooked separately or longer. If you want the whole bird cooked through, expect drier meat, which is why the recipe leans on butter.
- "Must not be kept so long"Wild duck was routinely hung to ripen; here Beeton directs that widgeon not be kept as long as wild duck. Cook it within a day or two of plucking.
- Orange gravyBeeton's orange gravy is a brown gravy sharpened with the juice and shredded rind of Seville orange and a glass of port. Sweet orange plus a squeeze of lemon approximates the sourness of the Seville.
- YieldA wigeon dresses out at about 1 to 1.5 lb, so one bird per person, or split between two if it is part of a larger game course.
Wigeon (Beeton's "widgeon") is a dabbling duck of estuaries and flooded grazing marsh, and it sat in the Victorian kitchen just below mallard in the hierarchy of wildfowl: cheaper and smaller, and the book cautions against hanging it as long. The October-to-February season given here tracks the birds' winter arrival on British coasts, and it overlaps with the legal wildfowling season in the modern UK, which runs from 1 September to 31 January inland and is extended on the foreshore to 20 February. That the entry gives a price at all is characteristic of the Beeton project, which treated cookery as household accounting as much as gastronomy; wildfowl were bought at market from professional gunners who supplied London game dealers by rail. The instruction to serve "hot and quickly" with a cut lemon is the standard Victorian handling of all rare-roasted game birds, where the fat sets unpleasantly as it cools and acid was thought to correct the richness.