Ducks
Do not empty them until ready to use them. Pick out the younger ones for the grill, and split larger varieties down the back but leave teal whole. Season only with salt and pepper. Grill, according to directions under Grilled Birds, to the stage of doneness where the juices are dark crimson.
If you have no grill, leave them all whole. Have the fire hot whether you are using a spit, oven, or a blistering hot, dry frying pan. The juices must not dry out.
If the ducks are old, or if you have eaten so many quickly cooked ones that you crave variety and change of flavor, smother them, like domestic ducks, in sauerkraut, turnips or green peas (see recipes under For the Bean Hole); or roast them in the ashes (see recipe under Cooking in the Ashes) or pot roast them. Celery or apple-and-celery stuffing, if you must stuff them; marjoram, savory and thyme if you must add any herbs besides celery to them; currant jelly, Worcestershire, and lemon juice, if you would alter the flavor of the gravy. Currant jelly, wild rice and cooked celery are the eternal accompaniments.
This is a method rather than a fixed recipe: it assumes you have several wild ducks of mixed age and size and want to know which treatment each deserves. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Teal are smallA teal is a single serving, while a mallard or black duck is two or three times its size and serves two. Splitting the larger birds down the back flattens them so the thick breast and thin leg finish closer together; teal are small enough to be left whole.
- Hanging undrawnLeaving the birds ungutted until cooking day was standard game-keeping when carcasses hung in cold outdoor air near freezing. It is not a practice to reproduce in a modern kitchen or a warm cooler; draw and chill birds promptly and refrigerate at 40F or below.
- "Dark crimson" juicesThis is rare, roughly 130-135F in the breast, which is how wild duck has traditionally been served because the lean, dark breast turns dry and livery past medium. Be aware that this is well under the 165F that current guidance gives for all poultry, wild birds included, and the risk falls on anyone who is pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- Heat, not timeThe hinge of the whole entry: the fire must be fierce and the cooking short. A grill at high direct heat, a spit over live coals, a hot oven, or a dry pan already smoking. A moderate fire steams a wild duck grey before the outside colors.
- The birds are leanWild ducks carry far less fat than a farmed Pekin, so much less renders out to protect them. Rub the skin with oil or lay a strip of bacon or salt pork over the breast if the fire is very hot; skip the fat-pricking and slow rendering that domestic duck recipes call for.
- Old birdsTough old birds are the ones for the long, wet treatments named here: smothering under sauerkraut, turnips or peas, ash-roasting, or pot-roasting. Those want a long, gentle, covered cooking until the leg meat gives.
- Stuffing and herbsCelery and apple in a wild duck are commonly used as aromatics rather than eaten, though the recipe does not say so. Note the author's reluctance throughout ('if you must'), and treat the marjoram, savory and thyme as a light hand rather than a mixture.
- The accompanimentsCurrant jelly is the sharp, translucent red jelly, still sold but no longer a supermarket staple everywhere; a spoonful stirred into the pan juices with lemon and Worcestershire makes the gravy described. Wild rice today is generally cultivated and cooks in 40-50 minutes, longer than white rice.
Wild duck occupies an odd place in American cookery: abundant enough on the flyways to be everyday food in duck country, but so unlike the fat farmed bird that the domestic recipes are actively misleading. The trio named at the end -- currant jelly, wild rice, cooked celery -- was a well-established convention by the time this book was written, and the jelly follows the older English habit of serving tart preserves with venison and game birds. The cross-references to a bean hole and to cooking in the ashes place this book in the outdoor-camp tradition, where a hunting party ate what it shot and sorted the bag by age: the young birds to the fire at once, the old ones consigned to the pot with sauerkraut or turnips, which is exactly the division a market cook never has to make.