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Roast Wild Duck
Dress and clean a wild duck and truss as goose. Place on rack in dripping-pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover breast with two very thin slices fat salt pork. Bake twenty to thirty minutes in a very hot oven, basting every five minutes with fat in pan; cut string and remove string and skewers. Serve with Orange or Olive Sauce. Currant jelly should accompany a duck course. Domestic ducks should always be well cooked, requiring little more than twice the time allowed for wild ducks.
Ducks are sometimes stuffed with apples, pared, cored, and cut in quarters, or three small onions may be put in body of duck to improve flavor. Neither apples nor onions are to be served. If a stuffing to be eaten is desired, cover pieces of dry bread with boiling water; as soon as bread has absorbed water, press out the water; season bread with salt, pepper, melted butter, finely chopped onion, or use Duck Stuffing (Peanut) ¾ cup cracker crumbs 1/2 cup shelled peanuts, finely chopped 1/2 cup heavy cream 2 tablespoons butter Few drops onion juice Salt and pepper
A short, hot roast that treats the wild bird as something close to red meat. Most of what needs translating here is oven heat, the barding pork, and the fact that the book's advice for domestic duck no longer matches modern practice.
- "A very hot oven"Read this as 450-500F. The whole method depends on it: twenty minutes at a moderate heat would leave a wild duck grey and dry rather than rare and juicy.
- Fat salt porkTwo thin sheets laid over the breast are barding, not seasoning. Wild ducks carry almost no fat of their own, and the pork supplies the drippings the recipe tells you to baste with. Thin-cut unsmoked streaky bacon or fatback does the same job; smoked bacon will dominate the bird.
- DonenessTwenty to thirty minutes brings the breast of a mallard-sized bird to rare or medium-rare, around 130-135F, which is the point this style of short, fierce roast is aiming at. Current food-safety guidance for wild game birds is 165F throughout; cook to that and the breast will be dry, so cook the bird to your own judgement knowing which standard you are departing from. Legs and thighs are tough at rare and are often removed and braised separately.
- ShotAny bird taken with a shotgun may hold pellets and the bruised, blood-shot flesh around them. Feel the breast through before roasting and warn anyone at the table. Older birds also benefit from being plucked rather than skinned, since the skin is what protects the meat in a fast oven.
- Aromatics that are thrown awayThe quartered apples or three small onions go in the cavity purely to perfume the meat and are discarded, as the text says plainly. They also slow the roast slightly, so allow a few extra minutes if you use them.
- The peanut stuffing quantities"34 cup cracker crumbs" is a printing error for 3/4 cup. Bound with 1/2 cup heavy cream and 2 tablespoons butter it is a soft, rich forcemeat rather than a dry bread stuffing. Onion juice means the liquid pressed or grated from a raw onion; a teaspoon of grated onion with its juice is the practical substitute.
- Domestic duck"Little more than twice the time" works out to roughly 40 to 65 minutes at this high heat. A modern 5 lb Pekin is fatty and is better given 1.5 to 2 hours at a moderate heat so the fat renders, with a hot finish for the skin.
- YieldOne mallard or similar serves two at most; teal and other small ducks are one bird per person. The currant jelly is not optional garnish in this book's scheme but the expected sweet-tart counterweight to the dark meat, doing the work a fruit sauce does today.
Fannie Farmer's book comes from a period when wild duck was still as likely to be bought as shot. Nineteenth-century American markets sold canvasback, redhead and mallard by the brace, and the canvasback in particular commanded restaurant prices on the strength of its wild-celery diet. Market hunting was curtailed by the Lacey Act of 1900, which barred interstate traffic in illegally taken game, and then decisively ended by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, after which wild duck moved off the grocer's slab and onto the hunter's table, where it remains. The short, fierce roast and the accompanying currant jelly echo an English game tradition; the peanut stuffing does not, and reads as an American flourish of the period, when peanuts were becoming a respectable cookbook ingredient.