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Roast Wild Duck
Dress and clean a wild duck and truss.
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) 3/4 Cup Bread Crumbs Cup Shelled Peanuts, Finely Chopped Cup Heavy Cream 2 Tablespoons Butter Substiute Few Drops Onion Juice Salt and Pepper Cayenne Mix ingredients in the order given.
A brief, high-heat roast of the sort wild duck demands, with a bonus stuffing appended at the end. Most of the work is in the barding and the basting.
- "A very hot oven"Read this as 450-500F. The short roast depends on it: the breast cooks before the lean flesh dries out, and the salt pork renders fast enough to keep the surface basted.
- Doneness of wild birdsTwenty to thirty minutes at that heat leaves a mallard breast rare to medium-rare, which is what the writer intended. Current food-safety guidance for all poultry, wild or farmed, is 165F at the thickest point; cooking wild duck to that temperature will give you a firm, grey, well-done bird. Choose knowingly.
- Bird size and yieldNo weight is given. A mallard of about 2 to 2.5 lb dressed serves two; teal and other small ducks are one bird per person. Very small birds want the shorter end of the timing.
- Barding porkTwo thin slices of fat salt pork over the breast substitute for the fat a wild duck does not have. Unsmoked pork fatback or thinly sliced pancetta works; streaky bacon adds a smoke flavour the orange sauce was not written for.
- Domestic duckThe advice to give a domestic duck a little more than twice the time is well short of modern practice. A 5 lb Pekin needs one and a half to two hours, usually starting at a lower temperature, so the heavy fat layer renders before the skin finishes browning.
- Apples and onions in the cavityThese are aromatics only, as the text says: neither is to be served. The recipe offers the onions as a way to improve flavour; the notion that such aromatics draw off the strong taste of fish-fed birds is traditional kitchen belief rather than demonstrated fact.
- Butter substituteIn the peanut stuffing this means margarine or oleo, an economy of the period. Plain butter is the better choice now.
- ShotRun a finger over the breast of any shot bird before trussing. Pellets and the bruised, bloodshot flesh around them are worth cutting away.
- ServingOrange sauce and currant jelly both lean sweet-tart against the strong meat. Olive sauce, the other option given, is a brown sauce with stoned olives simmered in it.
Roast wild duck belongs to a long American tradition of home cooks handling game, and its rules are the opposite of those for farmyard poultry: a wild duck is lean, dark and dry, so it is barded with pork fat, roasted hard and fast, and served with something sweet and sharp. Currant jelly with duck was a common convention in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery and survived into the twentieth-century household books largely as inherited etiquette. The peanut stuffing tacked on at the end is a more distinctly American touch, of a piece with the enthusiasm for peanuts in savoury cookery that spread through household manuals in the early decades of the twentieth century.