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Break Out the Old Duck Press
You may not feel up to stewing one wild duck in the pressed blood and raw juices of its mate, as they do down in New Orleans where wooden duck presses are as necessary sporting equipment as cork decoys. So instead, stuff one with sage, onion, bread crumbs, butter, salt and pepper; and roast its mate without either seasoning or dressing. This makes a palatable contrast when a little of each bird goes on every plate. But a great way to do a duck is Hunters' Style-Salmide Canards Sauvages à la Chasseur as the menu-makers say. Just clean and wipe a brace of canvasbacks, cut off the legs, wings and breast and set them aside out of reach of the cat while you lightly salt the carcasses and giblets, bake them about the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette and then hash all together, put even the bones into a stewpan, pour in a couple of glasses of beef or veal broth, add a snugly tied herb bouquet and set to simmering for fifteen minutes or so. In a separate saucepan melt a ball of butter about the size of a tame duck's egg, lightly season the legs, wings and breasts and brown them for a few minutes on each side. Squeeze over them the juice of a lemon and toss in the whole rind, grated. Then put in a cupful of strongly flavored meat broth and strain in all the gravy from the cooked carcass and giblet hash. Sauté for fifteen minutes and serve surrounded by diced butter-fried croutons. A big bowl of sliced oranges makes a swell side dish. Oranges and duck are so much en rapport that some recipes, such as Teal à la Bigarade, take their name from the local sour orange, of which both the juice and grated rind are used in the cooking. Serve with the same wild rice the birds feed on.
This is a salmis — birds part-roasted, then broken down so the carcass makes the sauce while the prime cuts finish in it. The method is sound; the vocabulary and the timings need translating.
- The hinge: don't sauté the breasts for fifteen minutesWild duck breast is lean and dark, and it turns to liver-flavored leather past medium-rare. Brown it, then let it sit in the finished sauce only long enough to heat through — two or three minutes — and slice it on the bias. The legs and wings are the parts that want the full simmer.
- "The length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette"Five to seven minutes. The recipe gives no oven temperature; a hot oven is an editorial inference, not the book's instruction. The carcasses and giblets are only being colored to build flavor for the broth, not cooked through.
- A ball of butter the size of a duck's eggA duck egg runs about 2.5 oz, so roughly 5 tablespoons. Half that is plenty in a modern pan.
- Glasses of brothA "glass" in this kind of writing is imprecise, anywhere from roughly 4 to 8 fluid ounces, so two glasses for the carcass pot is somewhere between 1 and 2 cups; the later "cupful of strongly flavored meat broth" is a cup of good veal or beef stock, ideally unsalted so the reduction doesn't turn briny.
- CanvasbacksCanvasback is a legal North American game duck under migratory bird regulations, with tight bag limits and no commercial sale — you cannot buy one. Any legally taken wild duck works, and two 5 lb domestic Pekin ducks will follow the same procedure with more fat to render and a milder flavor.
- Bigarade orangesThe bitter Seville-type orange the passage refers to. If you can't find them, use fresh orange juice cut with a little lemon; ordinary sweet orange alone makes the sauce cloying.
- The whole grated rindGrate the zest only, not the white pith, and add it near the end. Fifteen minutes of simmering with a whole lemon's worth of zest will push the sauce toward bitterness.
- Strain, then check the seasoningThe carcass hash goes through a fine strainer and gets pressed hard to extract everything; bone fragments must not reach the plate. Season after reduction, not before.
- YieldA brace of wild ducks, with croutons, oranges and wild rice, serves two generously or four as part of a larger meal.