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Duck-and-Orange Salad
Slice the oranges lengthwise; use twice as much flesh as fruit. Dress with oil, salt and paprica, and serve on lettuce leaves.
Three lines of instruction that assume you already have cold roast duck on hand and know what to do with it. The proportions and the dressing are the only real decisions.
- "Flesh" means the duckTwice as much cooked duck meat as orange. The recipe assumes cold roast duck already in the house; it specifies no quantities beyond that ratio, so scale it to what you have.
- Slicing lengthwiseCut from stem end to blossom end rather than crosswise. The recipe says nothing about peel or pith; peeling down to the flesh is a sensible modern step, not an instruction.
- No vinegar, and that is deliberateNo vinegar -- the dressing is oil, salt and paprika only, with the juice released by the oranges as the only acid. If the oranges are very sweet, a teaspoon of lemon juice restores the balance without turning it into a vinaigrette.
- Paprika in 1900Paprika -- period paprika was generally mild and used as much for colour as for heat. Modern smoked or hot paprika will overwhelm the duck; use plain sweet paprika, sparingly.
- OilThe recipe says only "oil", most likely a plain salad oil. A light olive oil or a neutral oil works; strong peppery oil fights the fruit.
- TemperatureNothing is stated, but a salad of cold roast duck implies serving cold. Duck fat sets firm and unpleasant when chilled, so trimming visible fat and skin before dressing is worth doing.
Duck with orange is a long-established pairing in European cooking, often traced through French practice to the bitter-orange sauces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it survives in restaurant form as canard à l'orange. What is characteristic of this book is the demotion of that pairing to a cold salad built from the remains of yesterday's roast: turn-of-the-century American household cookery was preoccupied with using cooked meat a second time, and the salad course was the accepted place to put it. The recipe spells paprika here as "paprica" and treats it as a fashionable seasoning-and-garnish.