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Roast Duck with Orange Sauce
Scrape a tablespoonful each of fat bacon and raw onion and fry them together for five minutes; add the juice of an orange and a wineglassful of port wine, the drippings from the duck and seasoning of salt and pepper. Keep this hot without boiling, and serve with the duck after it is roasted.
This is the sauce only — Oscar assumes you already have a duck in the oven and a pan of drippings under it. Read it as a finishing sauce built in a small skillet while the bird rests.
- "Scrape" the bacon and onionScraping fat bacon against the back of a knife gives you a smooth paste of mostly fat with the lean left behind; the same treatment on a cut onion yields juice and pulp rather than dice. The result is a sauce with little in the way of visible solids. A tablespoon of minced fatback and finely grated onion is the practical equivalent.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Use a tawny or ruby port; nothing labelled cream or white.
- The drippingsDuck throws a great deal of clear fat. Pour off the pan juices, let them settle a minute, and add the dark juices from beneath rather than the fat cap, or the sauce will break into a greasy slick. Two to three tablespoons is enough.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Boiling drives off the port's alcohol and cooks the perfume out of the raw orange juice; held below a simmer the two stay bright. Keep the pan off direct heat once everything is in.
- The orangeOne juice orange gives roughly a third of a cup, which is more liquid than the port. Seville juice, if you can get it, is closer to what a sauce for duck traditionally wanted; ordinary navel juice is sweeter and may want a squeeze of lemon.
- Frying the fat and onionFive minutes over moderate heat is to soften the onion and render the bacon, not to colour them. Browning here pushes the sauce toward gravy.
- No thickeningThis is a loose, glossy sauce, not a gravy — it will pool rather than coat. Serve it in a boat alongside rather than spooning it over crisp duck skin.
- YieldSomething over half a cup once the port, juice and drippings are in; enough for one duck. Double it if you are roasting two birds.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's 1896 cookbook, was working within a French repertoire that had long paired duck with bitter orange — the classic *sauce bigarade*, named for the sour Seville-type orange rather than the sweet one. What he prints here is a hotel kitchen's shortcut version: no stock, no reduction, no roux, just fat, aromatics, juice, wine and the roasting pan's own liquid, assembled in the minutes between carving and service. In place of the older madeira or the caramel-and-vinegar gastrique, he calls for port. The terseness is characteristic of the book throughout: it was written for cooks who already knew how to roast a duck and needed only the house's particular finish.