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Roast Duck
Draw the ducks; stuff, truss and roast the same as chicken. Serve with giblet sauce and currant jelly If small, the ducks should be cooked in an hour.
A telegraphic entry that assumes you already know the chicken method a few pages earlier. The gaps worth filling are fat, temperature and what kind of duck is meant.
- "Draw" the ducksDrawing means removing the viscera; plucking the last pinfeathers and singeing off the down over a flame were separate steps of the same preparation. Any duck bought today comes drawn, with the neck and giblets bagged inside.
- Roast "the same as chicken" — with one changeDuck carries far more subcutaneous fat than chicken. Prick the skin all over the breast and thighs at a shallow angle before it goes in, and pour off the rendered fat once or twice during roasting, or the bird sits and steams in it.
- Real temperaturesThe recipe gives no oven setting and the chicken entry it refers to is not reproduced here. In a modern oven, a hot start to set the skin followed by a moderate heat works well. Domestic duck is done at 165F in the thickest part of the thigh.
- "If small... an hour"An hour suits a small wild duck of roughly 1-2 lb. A modern Pekin or Long Island duck of 5 lb wants closer to two hours in a moderate oven.
- Stuffing inside a fatty birdThe recipe does not say what to stuff with; sage and onion or a bread stuffing would be the usual choices. Stuffing packed in the cavity slows the roast and must itself reach 165F; cooking it separately in a dish gives a better bird and drier, crisper dressing.
- Giblet sauceSimmer the neck, gizzard and heart (not the liver, which turns bitter) in water with an onion and a bay leaf while the duck roasts, then thicken the strained stock with a roux made from a little of the pan fat. Chop the giblet meat back into it.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not black, and not jam. A plain red currant preserve is the closest common substitute; its sharpness is doing the work of a modern orange or cherry sauce.
- YieldA domestic duck of 5 lb serves three to four, since the frame is heavy and the breast small relative to the weight. A wild duck serves one or two.
Roast duck with currant jelly is the standard American table treatment inherited from English practice, where a tart red preserve was the expected companion to any dark-fleshed bird — venison, hare, wildfowl. That this entry casually says "if small" tells you the household was as likely to be handling shot ducks brought home in autumn as birds bought from a poulterer; market ducks in the early twentieth century were mostly the white Pekin breed established on Long Island, while the small ones would be teal, widgeon or mallard.