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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. Many who consider that ducks have a strong flavor lay apples in the body, having them cored and quartered. The apples absorb this flavor and are removed before the duck is sent to the table. Celery and onion are also 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 fowl before it is sent to the table. Truss the duck, sprinkle it with salt, pepper and flour, and roast thirty minutes, provided the duck is young and is desired rare. Full-grown domestic ducks should be roasted at least one hour and basted every ten minutes. Make a giblet gravy, and send apple sauce or grape or currant jelly to the table with the ducks. Green peas should also be served with roast duck.
The instructions assume you know your oven and your bird; the book gives neither a temperature nor a weight. A few numbers make this workable.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. As a modern working equivalent, use 450F for the short high-heat method and 350F once the bird is browned and needs an hour or more.
- The thirty-minute duckThirty minutes will not bring a whole duck of any size to a safe internal temperature, and modern practice does not treat a whole poultry carcass the way it treats a seared breast. If you want pink duck, cook the breasts separately to 130-135F and give the legs their own long roast; check the thigh of a whole bird for 165F at the joint.
- Duck size and yieldA supermarket Pekin duck runs 4-6 lb and feeds two to three people, far less than its weight suggests, because so much of it is fat and frame. Two ducks for four to six is the honest calculation.
- Fat managementThe recipe says nothing about the fat layer. Prick the skin over the breast and thighs, set the bird on a rack, and pour off the rendered fat once or twice during roasting; it keeps well and is worth saving.
- BastingThe recipe calls for basting every ten minutes. With a self-basting fat layer and a modern oven you get crisper skin by leaving it alone and instead raising the heat to 425F for the last fifteen minutes.
- Aromatic cavity fillingsThe apples, or the celery-and-onion mixture at two tablespoons chopped onion per cup of celery, are seasoning devices and are discarded. They also slow the cooking of the cavity, so allow extra time and take the temperature at the thigh rather than trusting the clock.
- Potato stuffing, put in hotThis instruction matters. Cold stuffing in a bird cavity sits for a long time in the range where bacteria multiply and pushes the roasting time out; if you stuff at all, the filling should be hot going in and should reach 165F itself.
- Giblet gravyThe neck, heart and gizzard simmer for an hour in salted water with an onion; the liver goes in for the last ten minutes only, or it turns bitter and grainy. Chop the giblets, thicken the strained broth with the pan drippings and a little flour.
- At tableApple sauce, grape or currant jelly and green peas are all acid or sweet counterweights to a rich bird, and the pairing still holds. Any sharp fruit condiment does the same job.
Roast duck sat in a slightly awkward place in American cookery around 1900: domestic Pekin ducks, raised in quantity on Long Island from the later nineteenth century, were plentiful, but the bird was widely thought fatty and strong-tasting compared with chicken. Hence the two strategies in this entry: quartered apples in the cavity to absorb what the book calls the strong flavor, or a celery-and-onion mixture used purely as seasoning and thrown away. The distinction between the "epicure's" rare young duckling and the full-grown bird given an hour with constant basting reflects a difference in the birds on the market, where young ducklings and older, full-grown ducks were sold side by side. The fixed accompaniments -- apple sauce, currant or grape jelly, green peas -- recur often enough in period menus that a cookbook could list them as a rule rather than a suggestion.