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Deviled Teal Ducks
Cut into small pieces two or three large onions, place them in a mortar, add a small piece of green ginger and six or eight green peppers, and pound them to a pulp. Add two teaspoonfuls each of chutney and mustard, and a small quantity each of cayenne, pepper and salt; put the mixture into a saucepan, and pour in one-half pint of claret. Cut a teal in pieces and put them in a saucepan, and let them simmer gently at the side of the fire until the meat is done; this will take a long time. Arrange the pieces of teal on a dish, pour the sauce over, and serve.
Teal Ducks, Gourmet Style After the bird has been plucked, singed and drawn, split it open down the back with a knife, but do not divide it; pour boiling water over and remove the pink substance that will be found to line the back; season the interior of the teal with spices, and brown it in a brisk oven for ten or fifteen minutes. Afterwards place the bird on a gridiron, the inside next to the fire, and broil it for five minutes. Make some rich brown gravy, thickening it with baked flour. Place the bird on a large slice of toasted bread, garnish it with groups of vegetables, slices of beet-root and quarters of lemons and oranges, and serve with a red currant jelly on a small glass dish. A fringe of watercress should also be arranged round the dish.
Two treatments of the same bird: a long-simmered curry-ish devil and a quick roast-then-broil. Both assume a wild teal weighing well under a pound dressed, which is the first thing to sort out.
- The birdTeal is among the smallest of the wild ducks — a dressed bird runs roughly 8 to 12 oz and serves one person. Wild teal cannot be bought; it comes from a licensed hunter in season. Farmed substitutes: for the deviled version use duck legs (about 1 lb for two people), for the roasted version a whole Pekin duckling scaled up in time, or two boneless breasts.
- Green peppers means chilliesSix or eight green peppers pounded with ginger and cayenne is the vocabulary of an Anglo-Indian devil — read these as fresh green chillies, serranos or long green Indian chillies. Six to eight is aggressive; start with three and taste.
- Green gingerFresh ginger root, not preserved or ground. A piece the size of a thumb joint, peeled.
- ChutneyRead as a sweet mango chutney of the Major Grey type. Chop any large fruit pieces before they go in the mortar.
- Mortar workA food processor does this in thirty seconds. Pulse the onion, ginger and chillies to a coarse paste rather than a liquid purée, or the sauce loses body.
- Half a pint of claretOne cup of dry red wine — claret meant Bordeaux, so a Cabernet or Merlot is in the spirit of it. Half a pint is the only liquid in the pan, so keep the lid on and the heat very low.
- "At the side of the fire"The cool edge of a coal range: a bare simmer, not a boil. On a modern burner that is the lowest setting with the lid on, or a 300F oven. Duck legs need 90 minutes to two hours to become tender; breast meat treated this way will be dry, so use legs and thighs.
- Oven and gridironA "brisk oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F. The gridiron stage — cut side toward the heat for five minutes — is a broiler set high with the rack close, or a very hot grill.
- The pink substanceWhat lines the backbone of a split duck is lung tissue and kidney remnants. Scraping it out is worth doing on any bird; it is bitter and spongy. Scalding first, as directed, makes it lift away cleanly.
- Baked flourFlour spread on a tray and toasted in the oven until it smells nutty and turns pale tan. It thickens somewhat less than raw flour but adds colour and rules out any pasty taste — a standard nineteenth-century step for brown gravies.
Deviling — pounding chilli, mustard, ginger and cayenne into a paste and putting it on rich meat — reached American hotel kitchens by way of British Anglo-Indian cookery, where the same treatment went onto kidneys, bones and cold game. That two teal recipes sit side by side in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is a reminder that wild ducks were then market goods: teal, canvasback and mallard were shot commercially and shipped to city restaurants, and a Waldorf menu could offer them by name the way it offered oysters. The Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended that trade in the United States, which is why a dish an Oscar-era chef cooked by the dozen is now something only a hunter's kitchen sees. The second recipe's garnish — beet-root, orange and lemon quarters, currant jelly in a small glass dish, a fringe of watercress — is pure hotel plating of the period, when the arrangement was considered as much a part of the recipe as the cooking.