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Roast Duck
Epicures prefer young ducks, cooked rare, and when so prepared they are not stuffed. Should filling be preferred, use potato stuffing, putting it in very hot. Some people consider that ducks have a strong flavor, and to absorb this flavor lay cored and quartered apples inside the body. These apples are removed before the duck is sent to the table. Celery and onions also may be placed inside the duck to season it and improve the flavor, two tablespoons of chopped onion being used to every cup of chopped celery, which may consist of the green stalks that are not desired for the table. This stuffing is also removed from the bird before it is sent to the table.
Truss the duck, sprinkle it with salt, pepper and flour, and roast in a very hot oven (400-480° F.) fifteen to thirty minutes, provided the duck is young and is desired rare. Full-grown domestic ducks should be roasted at least one hour in an oven only moderately hot and should be basted every ten minutes. Serve with giblet gravy and apple sauce or grape or currant jelly. Green peas should also be served with roast duck. 20V
The instructions assume a bird nothing like the vacuum-packed supermarket duck, and two quite different methods are folded into one paragraph: a fast, hot roast for a young duckling served rare, and a long, moderate roast for a mature bird. Decide which you are doing before the duck goes near the oven.
- Which duck you haveA young duckling in this period meant a bird of about 8 to 12 weeks, 4 to 5 lb dressed — essentially what is sold today as Long Island or Pekin duckling. A "full-grown domestic duck" was an older, tougher, fattier bird that needed the hour of moderate roasting and constant basting; you will rarely meet one now.
- The oven numbersThe recipe usefully gives its own figures: 400–480°F for the quick roast. It puts no number on "only moderately hot" for the older bird; in period usage that generally meant something in the region of 350–375°F. At 480°F a fatty duck will smoke heavily, so 425–450°F is the practical end of that range unless your extraction is good.
- Fifteen to thirty minutes is for the breast onlyThat timing produces a rare breast and legs that are essentially raw. Modern practice for a whole duck is to take the thigh joint to 165°F while accepting a pinker breast, or to break the bird down and cook breast and legs separately — magrets rare, legs slow-roasted or confited.
- Do not combine rare with stuffingPotato stuffing "put in very hot" was the period's way of compensating for a cavity that never reaches temperature. Stuffing inside a bird roasted twenty minutes sits for a long stretch in the danger zone. If you want potato stuffing, bake it in a dish alongside.
- Apples, celery and onion are aromatics, not stuffingThe recipe is explicit that these come out before serving, and it is right to be. They perfume the cavity and absorb some of the musky flavour of an older bird; they do not become edible. Two tablespoons chopped onion to each cup of chopped celery, using the coarse green outer stalks.
- Flour and fatSprinkling the skin with flour was standard for building a browned crust before fan ovens. It works, but pricking the fat layer over the breast and legs with a skewer does more for the skin, and pouring off the rendered fat once or twice keeps the bird from frying in the pan. Save the fat.
- Basting every ten minutesOnly relevant to the hour-long roast of a mature bird. A modern duckling renders enough of its own fat that frequent basting mostly cools the oven; leave it alone and pour off fat instead.
- Yield and accompanimentsA 5 lb duckling serves three, perhaps four with a substantial stuffing. Giblet gravy uses the neck, heart and gizzard simmered while the bird roasts — the liver is usually kept back, as it turns gravy bitter. Apple sauce or currant jelly and green peas are the period's fixed accompaniments.
- The stray "20V"A printer's or reference mark carried over from the page, not part of the method. Ignore it.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household compendia of this kind in the early twentieth century for a readership of middle-class American housekeepers who were increasingly cooking without live-in help. The duck described here is the domestic Pekin, imported to the United States from China in the 1870s and raised in such quantity on eastern Long Island that "Long Island duckling" became a menu term in its own right. The insistence that "epicures prefer young ducks, cooked rare" points to a fashion for rare duckling among those who could afford a young bird, while the alternative hour-long roast with basting every ten minutes is the practical instruction for whoever was actually cooking an older bird from the yard. The pairing with apple, and with currant or grape jelly, is far older than the book and is generally traced to the Northern European habit of setting something sharp and sweet against rich, fatty waterfowl.