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Canvas-Back Ducks
Roast the ducks for twenty minutes; serve whole; carve them at the table; lay them in the chafing dish with red pepper, salt, a large piece of butter, half a glass of currant jelly and an equal quantity of grape juice. Simmer a few minutes and serve.
A chafing-dish finish for a bird that has effectively left the American table. The cooking is trivial; the sauce and the sourcing are where the attention goes.
- The bird itselfCanvasback cannot be bought. Since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 the sale of wild waterfowl has been illegal in the United States, and canvasback have been subject to restricted, at times wholly closed, seasons for much of the century since. A farmed duck, or a legally taken wild duck from a hunter, is the only route to this dish.
- Substitution and scaleA canvasback dresses out at roughly 2 to 2.5 lb and was reckoned one bird for one or two people. A whole Pekin duck runs 5 to 6 lb and will not behave the same way; two boned breasts, seared and rested, come closer to the intent than a whole large duck.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period ranges were rarely thermostatted. Twenty minutes for a whole wild duck implies a hot oven, and that timing produces a breast at rare to medium-rare and legs that are frankly underdone, which was the accepted style for canvasback.
- Doneness with farmed duckRare duck breast is ordinary practice and is not the concern here. Farmed duck legs and thighs, however, need long cooking to be pleasant and should reach 165F; do not carry the twenty-minute rule across to them.
- The hinge: keep the sauce below a simmerButter and currant jelly with grape juice will break or turn to candy if the chafing dish gets away from you. Melt the jelly into the juice first, then swirl the butter in off direct heat so it emulsifies rather than separating into oil and syrup.
- "Half a glass"A wine glass of the period is reckoned at roughly 2 fluid ounces, so half a glass is about 2 tablespoons of jelly and the same of juice. This is genuinely approximate; the original assumed you would judge by eye.
- Grape juice and red pepperGrape juice in a 1900s American book generally means unfermented juice, most likely Concord, sweet and heavily perfumed, not verjuice and not wine. "Red pepper" is cayenne, used by the pinch.
- The chafing dishThis is the tabletop pan over a spirit lamp, meant for a few minutes of gentle work in front of guests, not for cooking the bird. A small heavy skillet over the lowest burner does the same job.
The canvasback was the most celebrated game bird in nineteenth-century America, prized because the Chesapeake birds fed on wild celery, which was said to give the flesh a clean, nutty flavor no other duck could match. It commanded extraordinary prices in the restaurants of Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, where it was habitually paired with terrapin and served very rare with currant jelly, exactly as here. Market hunting on that scale is often said to have emptied the flyways, though habitat drainage was a major cause as well; the commercial trade was closed off by a sequence of measures u2014the Lacey Act of 1900, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 egulated game bird rather than a restaurant staple. That this appears under Chafing-Dish Cookery places it squarely in the fashion of the 1890s and 1900s, when the chafing dish was the equipment of choice for late suppers and small entertaining, and a cook was expected to finish something expensive at the table in full view.