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Rcast Wild Duck
Clean the same as turkey, wiping both inside and outside with a damp towel. Tuck back the wings and truss. Dust the fowls with salt, pepper and flour, put a piece of butter the size of a walnut in each, place them in a bakingpan, and add one cup of water. Bake from twenty-five to thirtyfive minutes, basting frequently with butter. When done, serve with slices of lemon and a good gravy. Wild ducks are seldom stuffed when roasted.
Nearly all wild ducks are apt to have a fishy flavor, and when dressed by an inexperienced cook are often unfit to eat. This flavor may be much lessened by placing in each duck a small peeled carrot, plunging the fowls in boiling water and boiling them ten minutes before roasting. The carrot will absorb the unpleasant taste. An onion will have the same effect, but unless onion is used in the stuffing, the carrot is to be preferred. When there is an objection to parboiling (which there always should be when very young ducks are to be cooked), rub the ducks lightly with an onion cut in two, and put three or four uncooked cranberries in each before cooking.
The original assumes a cook who knows her bird and her range. Two things need filling in: the oven temperature, which is never stated, and the fact that the timing given only works at high heat with the breast left pink.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, as was usual in books of this period. Wild duck at 25-35 minutes only makes sense in a hot oven, 450-475F. At 350F you will get grey, dry meat long before the thigh gives up.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout one tablespoon per bird. The shelled nut, not the whole one in its hull.
- Doneness, and the disagreement about itTwenty-five to thirty-five minutes at high heat brings a mallard breast to roughly 130-135F, which is what the recipe intends and what game cooks still aim for. USDA guidance for all poultry, wild included, is 165F throughout; a bird taken to 165F will be well past what this method was designed to produce. Decide which standard you are cooking to before you start.
- The fishy flavorIt comes from diet, not from mishandling: fish-eating divers such as merganser, scaup and bufflehead taste of what they eat, while grain-fed mallard, teal and pintail do not. Whatever the carrot-and-boiling-water trick does, parboiling costs the meat a good deal. Better to know which species you have and cook the dabblers hot and fast.
- Skin and fatWild duck carries a fraction of the fat of a farmed Pekin, which may be why this recipe bastes frequently and adds a cup of water to the pan. Do not treat it like a supermarket duck; there is no fat layer to render out and nothing to protect the breast.
- ShotBirds taken with lead shot may still carry pellets and the bruised tissue around them. Feel the breast through before roasting and remove what you find, and be aware that lead fragments in game meat are a genuine exposure route, particularly for children.
- YieldReckon one teal or wood duck per person, one mallard or pintail for two. The recipe is written for several birds at once, which is how they arrived.
- ServingThe book does not say what 'a good gravy' means; pan juices deglazed and reduced suit the bird best, though the flour dusting suggests the original may well have been thickened. Currant or cranberry jelly is a common period accompaniment and still a good one.
The Butterick Cook Book came out of the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, and it was written for a middle-class household that might plausibly be handed a brace of ducks by a hunting husband or buy them from a market stall. Wild waterfowl was still ordinary commercial food when this was printed: market hunters shipped ducks by the barrel to city game dealers, a trade the Lacey Act of 1900 began to restrict and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 effectively ended by outlawing the sale of migratory birds. That is why a general household cookbook of this period treats roast wild duck as a routine entry alongside chicken. The long warning about fishy flavor and inexperienced cooks reflects the same reality: the birds reaching a household kitchen came from that commercial trade, diving ducks and dabblers alike.