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Roast Teal Ducks
Singe, draw and truss the required number of birds, wipe them with a wet towel, cut off the heads and feet. Put one tablespoonful of butter, one saltspoonful of salt, and one saltspoonful of pepper in each bird, and lay them in a dripping pan; peel an onion, put it into the pan with the teal, set the birds in a very hot oven, and bake them for twenty minutes, basting them every five minutes, adding more butter if it is required for basting. Just before serving the birds, season them with salt, and serve with a sauce made up as follows, while they are being cooked: Peel and chop fine a shallot or onion, put it over the fire with one tablespoonful of butter, and when the butter begins to brown, stir in one tablespoonful of flour; when the flour is brown add one-half pint each of port wine and boiling water, one teaspoonful of salt, one-fourth teaspoonful of pepper and a little grated nutmeg. Stir the sauce until it boils, then keep it hot. When the birds are done, pour the drippings from them into the sauce, mix them well with it, and serve hot.
A fast, high-heat roast built around a very small bird, with a browned-flour port sauce made while the ducks cook. Almost everything hinges on the size of a teal.
- The birdA teal is the smallest of the common wild ducks, a dressed bird generally well under a pound. Twenty minutes suits that size and nothing larger; a mallard or a farmed Pekin needs far longer and a different approach. Figure one teal per person, two for a large appetite.
- "A very hot oven"The recipe gives no temperature; the term is usually taken to mean somewhere around 450-500F. Preheat fully and use a shallow pan so the heat reaches the underside.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So each bird gets 1 tbsp butter, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper in the cavity.
- Half a pintOne cup each of port and boiling water, giving about a pint of sauce before the drippings go in. That is generous for two or three birds and can be halved.
- DonenessTwenty minutes at that heat leaves the breast pink to rare, which is how wild waterfowl was and still is customarily served. Be aware that the USDA figure for poultry is 165F throughout, and that rare game duck sits well below it; the risk is yours to weigh, and it is not a preparation to serve to anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised.
- Sourcing and shotWild teal cannot be bought in the United States; it comes from a licensed hunter. Check the breast and thighs for pellets before cooking, and prefer birds taken with non-toxic shot, as lead fragments scatter well beyond the wound channel.
- Singe, draw, trussSingeing burns off pinfeathers over a flame, drawing is removing the innards. Birds bought or received already dressed need neither. The onion goes into the pan whole and the recipe gives it no further use.
- The sauceCook the butter and flour to a genuine brown roux before the liquid goes in, as the recipe directs. Add the boiling water in stages to avoid lumps, and hold it at a bare simmer; the pan drippings stirred in at the last minute are what make it taste of duck.
Oscar Tschirky was ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 cook book records what a great New York hotel actually put in front of guests in the 1890s. Wild ducks were among them because market hunting was still legal and commonplace: teal, canvasback, redhead and mallard arrived by rail from the Chesapeake and the Midwest flyways and appeared on restaurant menus by the brace, priced like any other luxury. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended that trade in the United States, which is why a dish that was once a matter of ordering from a supplier is now a matter of knowing a hunter. The sauce is built on browned flour, port and water rather than a long-simmered stock, and it is finished with grated nutmeg.