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Stewed Duck with Chestnuts
Draw and prepare a duck, lard the breast with bacon and roast it in the oven; put into a saucepan one pint of beef gravy, two dozen roasted and peeled chestnuts, two onions sliced and fried in butter, a small sprig of sage and thyme, and season with pepper and salt. Cut the duck up and put it in the saucepan, cover, and stand the pan by the side of the fire and simmer for twenty minutes; then dish it, skim the gravy, take out the herbs, add one teacupful of sherry wine, thicken with flour and butter, and boil. Then pour it over the duck, and serve with the chestnuts around it.
A two-stage dish: the duck is roasted first, then jointed and finished in a chestnut gravy. The instructions assume you already know how to roast a bird and make a brown gravy, so the details worth pinning down are the vessel, the chestnuts and the thickening.
- Roast the duck only part wayThe recipe names no oven heat. Since the joints simmer another twenty minutes and then sit under a boiled sauce, take the bird out while the leg meat is still short of done — a hot oven at first to set the skin, then moderate heat, stopping before the thighs are fully cooked. A fully roasted duck reheated in gravy shreds.
- "Lard the breast with bacon"In period usage this may mean threading strips of fat through the meat with a larding needle, but for a breast it is often simply strips laid over the surface (barding). Duck breast has ample fat of its own, so the bacon is largely for flavour and to keep the surface from drying, and it can be discarded before jointing.
- "By the side of the fire"A range-top instruction meaning gentle indirect heat, not a boil. Use the lowest burner setting or a 300F oven, covered, so the liquid barely trembles.
- Beef gravyThis means a kitchen-made brown gravy or stock, not thickened drippings sold in jars. A pint of good beef or veal stock, reduced a little, is the right substitute; the flour and butter at the end supplies the body.
- Two dozen chestnutsAbout 12-14 oz in the shell, or roughly 8-9 oz peeled — one 7 oz vacuum pack of cooked peeled chestnuts is close enough. They are already cooked before they go in, so twenty minutes of simmering is about their limit before they collapse into the sauce.
- Thicken with flour and butterEqual weights kneaded cold into a paste (beurre manié), whisked into the skimmed gravy in small pieces, then brought to a boil for a minute or two to cook out the raw flour. Start with about 1 tablespoon each per pint.
- A teacupful of sherryPeriod teacups are reckoned variously, from about 4 to 6 fl oz. That is still a lot of wine for a pint of gravy — add it before the final boil so some of the alcohol cooks off, and a dry amontillado or oloroso suits better than a sweet cream sherry.
- YieldOne duck of 4-5 lb serves three, or four modestly. Doubling the sauce is easier than doubling the bird.
Duck with chestnuts is an old European pairing — the sweetness and starch of chestnut against a rich, fatty bird — and it reached American hotel menus through the French repertoire, where variations on canard aux marrons were standard autumn cooking. What marks this version as a hotel recipe rather than a home one is the casual opening call for a pint of beef gravy: in a kitchen like the Waldorf's, brown stock and sauce were made daily in quantity by the sauce station, so a cook could requisition a pint the way a modern cook reaches for salt. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, compiled his 1896 Cook Book as a vast reference of that professional repertoire, and the terse, assumption-heavy style throughout reflects readers he expected to know the basics already. The barding with bacon and the sprig each of sage and thyme are the older Anglo-American touches, closer to an English stewed-duck receipt than to Paris.