No. 1923

Duck with Cherries

Canard aux Cerises

Prepare a duck for an entree (No. 178) after cleaning and singeing it; lay it in a saucepan lined with slices of fat pork and moisten to half its height with a mirepoix white wine stock (No. 419) bring the liquid to a boil and finish cooking in a slow oven. Suppress the stones and stalks from one pound of sour cherries, set them into an untinned copper pan with a little water, lemon peel, cinnamon and sugar, and let boil for a few moments, in case there should be no fresh cherries at hand take candied cherries or dried black ones; these should be soaked for an hour in tepid water, drained and put into a pan with a little fresh water, lemon juice and its peel, also cinnamon. Boil the cherries, then keep it at the same degree of heat, but discontinue the boiling for half an hour; the liquid should now be entirely absorbed. After the duck is ready, remove it from the saucepan and untruss, strain its stock, free it of fat and let reduce with some good brown sauce (No. 414), and after it attains a sufficient succulence and is well-reduced, run it through a tammy over the cherries. Dress the duck in the center of a dish, pour half the gravy over, lay the cherries around and serve the remainder of the sauce in a sauce-boat.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stockpot always going and a wall of copper; the dish itself is simple braised duck with a sour-cherry garnish. Two things need translating: the cross-references to other numbered recipes, and the copper pan.

Skip the untinned copperCooking acidic fruit in bare copper leaches copper salts into the food, and the practice was followed in professional kitchens precisely because it brightened colour. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron for the cherries; nothing in the result depends on the metal.
"A slow oven"Roughly 275-325F. The duck is half-submerged and braises gently rather than roasts; the recipe does not say whether the pan is covered. Cook until the leg meat pulls easily from the bone.
The referenced stocksNo. 419, the mirepoix with white wine, is an aromatic base of diced carrot, onion and celery with bay and thyme, sweated in fat pork or butter and moistened with white wine and stock. No. 414 is the book's brown sauce, in practice the classical roux-thickened brown veal sauce; a well-reduced brown veal or duck stock does the same work.
Sour cherriesMontmorency or Morello, not sweet Bing. Frozen sour cherries are the reliable modern substitute and need no soaking; dried sour cherries want the hour in tepid water the recipe specifies. One pound is roughly 3 cups pitted.
"Discontinue the boiling for half an hour"He means hold the cherries just below a simmer, uncovered, until the liquid has gone and they are glazed in their own syrup. Boiling them hard collapses them into jam; the point is whole fruit in a thick glaze.
Lining with fat porkSlices of unsmoked fatback or fresh side pork line the pan so the duck does not catch. Sliced pancetta or unsmoked bacon works; if the bacon is smoked, the smoke will carry into the sauce.
TammyA tammy is a woollen straining cloth. A fine chinois, or a fine-mesh sieve lined with dampened cheesecloth, gives the same result: the sauce is strained directly over the glazed cherries so they warm through without further cooking.
YieldOne duck prepared this way serves two generously, three at a table with several courses. Ranhofer treats it as an entree, meaning a mid-meal course rather than the whole dinner.

A Little History

Canard aux cerises belongs to the long French tradition of pairing rich waterfowl with sharp fruit, the same logic that gives us duck with orange, with green olives, or with turnips; the acid cuts fat, and sour cherries do it more cleanly than sugar-heavy sweet varieties. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen's repertoire, which is why the instruction here is so telescoped: the reader is assumed to have the numbered stocks and sauces already made and is being told only how this particular dish is assembled from them. The direction to use an untinned copper pan reflects a real nineteenth-century professional habit, generally explained at the time as preserving the colour of fruit and green vegetables, and one that food-safety writers of the same era were already arguing against.