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Duck Pie
Skin and boil for a quarter of an hour a duck, having first cut off the neck. Put the well-washed giblets over the fire with an anchovy, a little whole black pepper, a small bunch of sweet herbs, an onion, a bit of mace, a crust of bread toasted very brown, a very little cayenne and an ounce of butter. Cover the pan until the butter is quite melted and all is quite hot, then add half a pint of boiling water and stew until tender. Take up the giblets, strain the liquor and let it and the giblets stand until quite cold. When the duck is roasted remove and cut in pieces while yet hot. When the giblets are cold put them into a pie-dish, pour over the skimmed liquor they were boiled in with the gravy that has run from the duck, season the duck with salt and pepper, put into a pie-dish with a few pieces of butter, cover with puff-paste or short-crust, and bake.
An English giblet-and-duck pie carried into an American hotel book, written in the compressed style of its period: it assumes you know that a parboiled duck still has to be roasted before it goes under the crust. Read the whole thing through before you start, because the order of operations is not the order of the sentences.
- The sequenceThe duck is skinned, parboiled fifteen minutes, then roasted, then cut up hot; the giblets are stewed separately and both they and their liquor are chilled, and the recipe then calls for the liquor to be skimmed. Only then does anything go into the pie-dish. The recipe gives no reason for the parboil; rendering some fat from a bird fattier than a supermarket duck is the likeliest explanation.
- Half a pintAn American half-pint is one cup. That, the butter, the liquid the giblets give up and the gravy that runs from the roast duck make up the moisture in the filling, which should stay closer to a strong stock than a thin broth.
- The anchovy'An anchovy' here means a whole salted fish, i.e. two fillets by modern reckoning; it is a seasoning, not a flavour you will identify, and it dissolves into the stock. A modern jarred or tinned fillet does the same work; do not add extra salt until the stock is finished.
- The toasted crust'A crust of bread toasted very brown' is a colouring and body trick of the older English kitchen. Take it genuinely dark, short of burnt, and strain it out with the rest of the solids.
- Mace and sweet herbsA blade of mace is the lacy aril of nutmeg, sold whole in some spice shops; a small pinch of ground mace is a reasonable stand-in. 'Sweet herbs' was a loose term, usually a tied bundle along the lines of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf.
- Oven heatNo temperature or time is given. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking the pastry, not the pie: a hot oven for puff paste, a little cooler for short-crust, and take it out when the crust is set and browned.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and neck meat go in; the liver is best cooked separately and added at the end, or left out, since long stewing turns it bitter and grainy. Ducks now come with the giblets bagged inside, and often no neck, so you may need to buy extra necks or wings to get enough stock.
- YieldOne duck, skinned and off the bone, will fill a modest pie-dish; four servings is a reasonable expectation. If that seems lean, period giblet pies were often bulked out with a little rump steak or hard-boiled egg.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book is less a record of what the Waldorf's kitchen sent out than a vast compilation of what a well-read maitre d'hotel thought a cook should have on hand, and this duck pie is plainly an English inheritance rather than a hotel dish. Giblet pie -- the offcuts of a roast bird stewed, cooled, and baked under a crust with whatever meat could be spared -- runs through English domestic cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and the details here mark it as old: the anchovy used as a savoury seasoning, the blade of mace, the crust of bread toasted very brown to give the gravy colour. The instruction to let the liquor stand cold before skimming is the same fat-management every duck cook still practises.