Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Ducks
Stewed Ducks
Cut into joints two ducks, put in a stewpan with one pint of rich gravy; let this come to a boil, and as the scum rises, remove; season with salt and cayenne and stew gently for three-quarters of an hour; mix until smooth two teaspoonfuls of ground rice with one wineglassful of port wine, stir it into the gravy and boil for seven or eight minutes longer; then turn the whole onto a dish, and serve very hot.
A plain braise from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, written for a brigade that always had stock and gravy on hand. Two details carry the dish: the gravy you start with and the ground rice that thickens it at the end.
- "Rich gravy"In a hotel kitchen this meant a reduced brown sauce or espagnole, not pan drippings from a roast. A pint of well-reduced duck or veal stock, lightly thickened, will do the same work; unreduced supermarket broth leaves the finished sauce thin and flat.
- Brown the joints firstThe recipe does not say to, because the gravy carried the flavour. Searing the pieces in a little of their own rendered fat before adding liquid is the single change that most improves the result.
- Two ducks, in jointsA duck jointed properly gives two legs, two wings and two breast halves. A pint of liquid for two birds is a shallow braise rather than a submersion, so use a wide pan and turn the pieces once or twice.
- Timing by cutThree-quarters of an hour suits legs and thighs but overcooks the breast. Either pull the breast pieces out after about 20 minutes and return them at the end, or accept a well-done, fully braised bird as the period intended.
- Ground riceRice milled to a powder, sold as ground rice or rice flour; the traditional ground rice is a slightly coarser grind than the finest modern rice flours, but either will thicken. Two teaspoons in a wineglass of port is a slurry, and it needs the full seven or eight minutes of boiling to lose its raw starch taste.
- A wineglassfulAround two fluid ounces, a quarter cup, in period usage. Use a tawny or ruby port rather than anything labelled cooking wine.
- Skimming and fatDuck throws a great deal of fat. Skim as directed while it simmers, and skim again before the port goes in, or the finished sauce will break into a slick.
- YieldTwo ducks in joints serve four to six. Serve with something that takes sauce well; the recipe itself specifies no accompaniment.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published his Cook Book in 1896, a volume of some nine hundred pages meant as much for professional reference as for home use, which is why entries like this one give quantities and little else. Stewed duck thickened with ground rice and finished with port belongs to the Anglo-American repertoire the hotel inherited from mid-century English cookery, where rice flour was a standard thickener when a cook wanted body without the opacity of a flour roux, and port was a common partner to duck, hare and game. The instruction to skim as the scum rises is a mark of the same tradition: clarity of sauce was taken as a measure of a kitchen's discipline. Duck in New York restaurants at this date was often domestic Long Island duckling, a trade established and growing on eastern Long Island, though it did not reach its peak until the mid-twentieth century.