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Deviled Duck
Clean a good-sized duck and split down the back. Prepare a mixture of dry mustard, pepper, salt and chutney; rub it all over the duck, having previously pricked the skin with a fork, and boil it for twenty minutes. Put half a teacupful each of white wine, mushroom catsup, lemon-pickle and stock into a saucepan, and add a little sugar. Dish the duck, pour the sauce over it, and serve hot.
A deviled bird in this tradition is a spiced, split carcass finished over fierce heat, and the sauce is built from three English bottled condiments that have largely left American kitchens. Two lines need interpretation before you start.
- "Boil it for twenty minutes"Devilling is normally a fierce dry-heat technique, and many readers take lines like this as "broil," since twenty minutes of actual boiling would wash the mustard paste off. The text as printed does say boil, though, so treat broiling as an interpretation rather than a certainty.
- Cook it throughTwenty minutes of direct heat will not carry a whole raw duck to doneness. Roast or poach the bird first, then coat it with the mustard mixture and give it the short blast of heat to crisp and set the crust. Duck leg meat should reach 165F at the thigh joint.
- Split down the backThis is spatchcocking: cut through the backbone, open the bird flat, and flatten the breastbone with the heel of your hand so it sits level under the heat.
- Half a teacupfulA Victorian teacup runs 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a cupful is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces (4 to 6 tablespoons); about 1/4 cup per item is safe. Four such quantities give about a cup of sauce, which is right for one duck.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, nothing like tomato ketchup. It is still sold by British grocers; a mix of mushroom soy or a strong mushroom stock reduced with a dash of Worcestershire stands in for the savory depth.
- Lemon-pickleAn eighteenth-century English preserve of salted, spiced lemons — the same idea as North African preserved lemon. Chopped preserved lemon with a little of its brine is the closest match; plain lemon juice gives the acid but none of the salt or spice.
- Prick the skinWorth doing thoroughly. Duck skin carries a heavy fat layer, and the punctures let it render out rather than steaming the crust from beneath.
- YieldA good-sized duck split in two serves two generously, or three at a table with other dishes. Skim the fat from the sauce before pouring.
To "devil" a dish meant, from the late eighteenth century onward, to score it, coat it with mustard and cayenne, and scorch it — the name generally traced to the heat of the spicing rather than to any single cook or place. It was often a way of dealing with a bird that had already been to table once, which is why deviled bones, deviled turkey legs and deviled duck cluster in the breakfast and supper chapters of Victorian household books, though the treatment was applied to fresh birds as well. Oscar Tschirky's collection, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, drew heavily on this Anglo-French repertoire, and this recipe may well belong to it; the trio of mushroom catsup, lemon-pickle and chutney marks the recipe as English in ancestry: all three were pantry staples in Britain long before they reached a New York hotel kitchen.