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Roasted Widgeons
Pluck and singe a brace of widgeons, cut off the heads and claws, draw the birds without breaking the entrails and wipe them with a wet cloth; rub them all over with cold butter, dredge them with flour and roast them for about twenty minutes. Carefully preserve all the gravy that flows from them, and when nearly done sprinkle them with salt and pepper. Serve at once with their gravy and red currant jelly, or with orange essence made as follows: Chop very finely two peeled onions or one shallot, grate the yellow rind of a large orange and chop one ounce of ham or bacon very fine; put these ingredients into a small saucepan, add to them a small sprinkling of salt and pepper, one-half pint of gravy from roasted wild fowl, one gill of port wine and one saltspoonful of salt, and simmer all gently for ten minutes. Meanwhile squeeze the juice from a whole orange and half a lemon into a sauceboat. At the end of ten minutes strain the sauce into the orange and lemon juice, and serve immediately.
Broiled woodcocks Pluck, singe, draw, pick out the eyes, and remove the skin from the heads of six fine woodcocks, wipe them neatly, and split them through the backs without separating the parts. Put them on a dish, season with a little salt and pepper, and a tablespoonful of sweet oil. Roll them well with the seasoning and put them on to broil with the bills stuck in the breasts. Let them broil for four minutes on each side, then arrange them on a dish with six pieces of heart-shaped fried bread covered with minced hearts and livers as for roasted woodcock, spread over a gill of maitre h'hotel butter, decorate with six slices of fat bacon, and serve.
Two game-bird preparations from the Waldorf's roast cook, written for a kitchen that bought wild fowl by the dozen from market hunters. The instructions assume a very hot oven, birds served rare, and a cook who can dress them.
- Sourcing the birdsWild wigeon and woodcock cannot legally be sold in the United States; they reach a kitchen only as a gift from a licensed hunter. Farmed widgeon is not a commercial product either, so the nearest practical substitutes are farmed duck (mallard/Pekin) or squab, both of which cook similarly.
- A brace is twoA brace of widgeons is a pair, enough for two to four people depending on the rest of the meal. The woodcock recipe as written serves six, one small bird each.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a range oven had none. A twenty-minute roast implies a hot oven — something around 450F is a reasonable modern equivalent — browning the skin while leaving the breast rare, as wild duck was and still is served.
- DonenessThese birds come out pink to red at the breastbone. Wild waterfowl carries its own risks from shot, from field handling and from lead fragments, and any bird that has been shot should be cleaned carefully and the wound channels trimmed. Anyone who wants duck cooked through should choose a different recipe rather than extend this one, as a widgeon roasted to well done is dry and livery.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so a gill of port is 4 fl oz and a gill of maître d'hôtel butter is a generous half-cup of softened butter worked with lemon juice and parsley. A saltspoonful is about a quarter teaspoon — note that the orange essence calls for salt twice, once as a sprinkle and once measured; use the measured amount and stop there, since the reduced gravy is already seasoned.
- "Gravy from roasted wild fowl"This means the pan juices and any stock made from game carcasses, not a thickened sauce. Half a pint is one cup. A strong duck or game stock reduced until it has body will stand in; a poultry stock will taste thin against the port and orange.
- Drawing, and the exceptionThe widgeon is drawn without breaking the entrails, which is the whole difficulty of the job — a nicked gut taints the cavity. Woodcock traditionally are not drawn at all beyond the gizzard; here Oscar draws them but keeps the hearts and livers, mashed onto fried bread as the classic garnish.
- The headsThe woodcock are broiled with the bills stuck through the breasts, skinned and with the eyes removed. This is presentation rather than flavour, and can be skipped without affecting the dish.
- Timing the broilFour minutes a side under a modern broiler is aggressive for a bird that weighs six ounces. Watch it rather than the clock; the breast should stay rosy and the legs should just firm.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 records the Waldorf's kitchen at the height of American market hunting, when wild ducks, plover, snipe and woodcock arrived in New York by the barrel and appeared on hotel menus as a matter of routine. Widgeon, a small dabbling duck, was prized as a table bird because it feeds heavily on grasses and eelgrass rather than fish, giving cleaner flesh than many wild ducks. The orange-and-port sauce here belongs to the same French tradition that produced bigarade, the sharp orange sauce classically paired with duck. Within a generation the trade that supplied these birds was gone: the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the commercial sale of wild game birds in the United States, which is why a page like this reads today as a record of a kind of luxury restaurants can no longer buy.