Roast Duck
Ducks are dressed and stuffed in the same manner as above. Young ducks should roast from twenty-five to thirty minutes; fullgrown for an hour or more with frequent basting. Some prefer them underdone, served very hot, but thorough cooking will prove more generally palatable. Serve with currant jelly, apple sauce, and green pease. If old, parboil before roasting.
Place the remains of a cold roast duck in a stew-pan with a pint of gravy and a little sage, cover closely, and let it simmer for half an hour; add a pint of boiled green pease, stew a few minutes, remove to a dish, and pour over it the gravy and pease.
The instruction assumes a wild bird from the Game chapter and a cook who has already read the goose or turkey entry just above it for dressing and stuffing. Two dishes are folded into one paragraph: the roast, and a second-day stew of the leftovers.
- "Dressed and stuffed in the same manner as above"The stuffing is whatever was given in the entry immediately preceding this one, which is not reproduced here; the sage in the leftover stew suggests a sage-scented dressing. For wild duck a common modern approach is to leave the cavity loose with onion, apple and herbs rather than packing it, since a tight stuffing forces a longer roast and dries the breast.
- Oven heatThe book gives none, as was usual when the cook judged her own fire. Small wild ducks in 25-30 minutes implies a hot oven, in the region of 450F. A large domestic duck for "an hour or more" is better at around 350F after an initial hot spell to start the skin rendering.
- Wild versus domestic timingA teal or wood duck at 450F is done in about 25 minutes. A 5 lb Pekin duck from a supermarket is a very different bird, fatter and heavier, and needs closer to 2 hours, with the fat pricked from the skin and poured off as it collects.
- "Some prefer them underdone"Rare breast is still the standard treatment for wild duck, taken to about 130-135F and rested. Note that this is a judgement about wild birds only; USDA guidance for whole poultry is 165F, and stuffing cooked inside any bird should reach that temperature.
- BastingWild ducks are lean and genuinely need the frequent basting, usually with butter or a strip of fat pork laid over the breast. Domestic ducks render their own fat and need none.
- Parboiling an old birdThe recipe gives no time; a short simmer of fifteen to twenty minutes before roasting is a workable reading. It tenderises at the cost of flavour; braising a mature bird is the better modern route.
- Green peaseSimply green peas. Frozen peas are fine in the leftover stew and should go in at the very end, needing two or three minutes, not the longer stew the original implies for boiled fresh peas.
- The leftover dishA pint of gravy for the carved remains of one duck; use good stock reduced with the roasting juices if you have no gravy. Half an hour covered at a bare simmer is right, as the point is to warm and moisten the meat, not cook it further.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. As a rough guide, a wild duck serves one or two and a domestic duck of 5 lb three to four; the second-day stew stretches the carcass meat to two or three servings.
Roast duck of this period straddled the wild and the domestic bird: in the late nineteenth century a duck on the table might as easily have been shot as bought. The pairing with currant jelly is the old English game convention carried into American books wholesale, along with the belief that sharp fruit cuts the richness of dark wildfowl; apple sauce belongs more to the fatty domestic bird. The closing instruction for using up the cold roast is characteristic of the period's household manuals, where a recipe was expected to account for the whole bird across two days rather than end at the carving. The disagreement noted here over underdone versus thoroughly cooked duck was a live one throughout the nineteenth century, and the author's verdict that thorough cooking is "more generally palatable" reflects one side of it.