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Broiled Canvas-Back Ducks
Take a fine fat canvas-back duck, pick, singe, draw and wipe it thoroughly. Split it through the back without detaching the pieces, lay on a dish to season with a pinch of salt, half a pinch of pepper, and one tablespoonful of oil. Roll the duck well in it and broil for seven minutes on both sides. Dress it on a hot dish, spread over one-half gill of maitre d'hotel butter, decorate with a bunch of watercress, and serve.
A two-ingredient preparation in which everything depends on the bird and the timing. The chief obstacle now is legal rather than culinary: canvasback cannot be bought.
- The bird itselfCanvasback is a wild migratory duck, and in the United States its sale as food has been prohibited for over a century; it reaches the table only through legal hunting in season. A domestic Pekin or Muscovy duck, or a farmed mallard, is the practical substitute, though it will be fatter and milder than the wild bird Oscar had in mind.
- Picking and drawingThe recipe assumes a bird delivered whole and feathered. Anything you buy now arrives plucked and drawn; singeing over a flame to remove pinfeathers is still worth doing on a farmed duck.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of maitre d'hotel butter is about 1/4 cup — a generous quantity for one bird, and intended to melt into a sauce on the hot platter rather than sit as a pat.
- Maitre d'hotel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then chilled. Make it ahead and keep it firm so it melts at the table.
- What "broil" meantIn a kitchen of this period broiling generally meant a grid over live coals, radiant heat from below. A modern overhead broiler at full heat with the rack close to the element, or a very hot grill, gives the equivalent; the split bird goes skin side away from the heat first.
- Seven minutes a sideThat timing suits a wild duck of two to three pounds and leaves the breast frankly rare, which was the usual way canvasback was served. A farmed duck of four to five pounds will need considerably longer, and its heavier fat layer will flare over open flame — render it under lower heat before finishing hot.
- YieldOne canvasback serves one or two; a farmed duck of five pounds serves three or four.
The canvasback was the most prized game bird in nineteenth-century American dining, and its reputation rested on diet: the Chesapeake birds fed heavily on wild celery, which was generally credited with giving the flesh its particular sweetness. Market hunters supplied the great hotels and restaurants by the barrel, and a canvasback on the menu signalled the same thing terrapin or Lynnhaven oysters did — that the kitchen was buying at the top of the market. Oscar Tschirky's book dates from that era's close; the Lacey Act of 1900 and later the Migratory Bird Treaty Act ended the commercial trade in wild waterfowl, which is why a dish once ordinary in a Fifth Avenue dining room now requires a hunting licence. The treatment here is deliberately bare — salt, pepper, oil, fire, and a compound butter — on the principle that a bird worth that much money should taste of itself.