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Roast Duckling with Apple Sauce
Prepare and truss a tender duckling of about three and a half pounds weight; place it in a roasting pan, spread over it half an ounce of butter and a pinch of salt; cook in a brisk oven for thirty minutes, basting now and then with its own liquor. Place the duck on a hot dish and untruss, skim the fat off the liquor in the pan, pour in a teacupful of broth; let it come to a boil, then strain it over the duck and garnish with watercresses. Serve with hot applesauce in a sauceboat.
A very short set of instructions for a very short-cooked bird. The one thing to fix is the time: thirty minutes will not bring a whole duckling anywhere near done by current standards.
- "Brisk oven"Usually read as something in the 425-450F range, though the book gives no numbers and period oven words were approximate.
- Thirty minutes is not enoughA trussed 3.5 lb duckling needs roughly 1.5 to 2 hours total, and poultry should reach 165F in the thigh. A common modern approach is to start hot for 20-30 minutes, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder. Thirty minutes at any temperature leaves the leg meat raw.
- Half an ounce of butterAbout 1 tablespoon. It is there to help the skin colour; duck renders so much of its own fat that no more is needed, and basting "with its own liquor" means basting with that fat.
- A teacupful of brothCall it somewhere between 3/4 cup and a cup; the period teacup was not a standardised measure and sources differ.
- Skim before you pourThe pan will hold a great deal of duck fat. Skim it properly, or the finished jus breaks into a greasy film on the plate. Save the fat, refrigerated, for potatoes.
- The sauce is a jus, not a gravyThere is no flour or reduction step. Broth deglazes the pan, boils briefly, is strained, and goes over the bird. Do not thicken it; the applesauce is the sweet-acid counterweight.
- Untrussing on the hot dishCut and remove the strings before serving, and let the bird rest 10-15 minutes before carving. The recipe's order (dish, untruss, then make sauce) builds that rest in.
- YieldA 3.5 lb duckling serves two generously or three modestly. Applesauce, served hot in a sauceboat, wants about a cup and a half.
Duck with apple is an old northern European pairing — the fruit's acidity cuts a fatty bird — and it reached American hotel menus early. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and much of his book is written the way a maitre d'hotel dictates to professionals: weight of bird, temperature word, minutes, garnish, sauceboat, done. "Duckling" here means a young bird of a few months, a distinction that mattered when older ducks were common in the market and needed braising rather than roasting; the Long Island duckling, a Pekin-derived breed raised commercially on Long Island from the 1870s, was widely available to New York kitchens. The watercress garnish and the sauce served separately are both marks of the period's service style, where the plate arrived plain and the accompaniment came round after.