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Duck Stuffed with Chestnuts
1 large duck. 1 tablespoon butter. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon cayenne. 1 lb. chestnuts. 2 tablespoons cream. 1 tablespoon sugar. Boil chestnuts until tender, mash them, add cream, butter, sugar, pepper, and salt. Fill duck with this and roast, allowing 15 minutes to the pound.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to roast a duck, since Mrs. Wilson gives neither oven temperature nor any instruction for handling the bird's fat. Both matter more than the stuffing does.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as is common in books of this period; the cook is left to judge her own range. Roast at 425F for the first 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- The hinge: render the fatDuck carries a thick subcutaneous fat layer that must be given somewhere to go. Prick the skin all over at an angle, avoiding the flesh, and pour the fat out of the pan two or three times during roasting. Skip this and the skin stays flabby and the drippings scorch.
- TimingFifteen minutes to the pound gives about 75 minutes for a 5 lb duck, which is on the short side for a stuffed bird. Go by temperature instead: 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, and the same in the centre of the stuffing, which is the slowest part of the whole thing to heat.
- "1 large duck"Market ducks of the period generally ran somewhere in the region of 4-6 lb. A supermarket Pekin duck today is about 5 lb and is a reasonable substitute. That serves three, four at a stretch, since a duck yields less meat per pound than a chicken.
- ChestnutsA pound of fresh chestnuts in the shell gives roughly 12 oz of nutmeat. Score each with an X before boiling and peel both the shell and the bitter inner skin while still hot, or the skin welds itself on. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, about 12 oz, work and save half an hour; simmer them briefly in milk or stock to soften before mashing.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in a pound of chestnut puree is assertive but not extreme. The method line then calls for "pepper," which is the cayenne already listed, not a second addition of black pepper.
- The stuffing's sweetnessCream, butter and a tablespoon of sugar make this closer to a sweet chestnut puree than a bread stuffing. It reads as a deliberate foil to rich duck, in the same tradition as apple or cherry sauce with the bird.
- RestingGive the duck 15 minutes out of the oven before carving, and spoon the stuffing out separately rather than trying to carve around it.
Chestnuts and duck are an old pairing in French and English cookery, and by the time Mary A. Wilson was writing for American home cooks after the First World War the combination had long since crossed the Atlantic as a holiday dish. Chestnuts were then still an ordinary autumn commodity in the eastern United States: the American chestnut grew in vast stands through the Appalachians and the nuts were widely sold. The blight that arrived around the turn of the century was already destroying those trees as this book went to press, and within a few decades the chestnuts in an American kitchen would be imported Italian or Spanish ones. Wilson's version is characteristically brisk, trusting the cook with the parts a modern book would spell out, and her sweetened cream-and-butter puree belongs to a period when a stuffing might be a puree rather than a bread mixture.