No. 1927

Ducks' Giblets, Housekeepers' Style

Abatis de Canards a la Menagere

After a duck has been drawn and singed, chop off the neck as far down as the back, and divide this neck into two or three pieces. Remove the gall from the liver, being careful not to break it, and cut the liver in two or three pieces according to its size. Clean the wings well. Put four ounces of butter into a saucepan with the wings, the neck, and four ounces of lean salt pork blanched and cut in quarter inch squares; when these are nicely fried, add the liver, dredge in for every set of giblets a heaping tablespoonful of flour; stir well and let the flour cook for one second, then moisten with stock (No. 194a) and white wine; season with salt and pepper, and add one dozen small onions, and as many carrots cut pear-shape; let simmer for one hour and a half, remove the fat from the surface and put in a pint of uncooked green peas, then boil together for half an hour longer. When well done and properly seasoned, dress the meats in the middle of a dish with the vegetables arranged around, pour the sauce over and serve.

← No. 1926 Ducks with Turnips Duck & Goose No. 1928 Ducks' Paupiettes with Risot →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have just dressed a duck yourself and have the neck, wing tips, liver and heart in hand. Buying a bag of giblets from the butcher, or saving them in the freezer until you have two or three sets, gets you to the same place.

The hinge: the gall bladderThe small greenish-green sac attached to the liver must come away whole. Cut generously around it rather than tugging; a broken gall bladder makes the liver, and anything it touches, permanently bitter. Discard any part of the liver that has been stained by bile.
Add the liver last, and brieflyThe recipe fries wings, neck and pork first, then adds the liver just before the flour. Do not let the liver go into the hour-and-a-half simmer as a piece you intend to eat whole -- it will be granular. Either accept that it dissolves into the sauce as a thickener, or brown it, set it aside, and return it in the last five minutes.
Quantities are per set of gibletsFour ounces butter (one stick) and four ounces salt pork are given for one duck's giblets; the heaping tablespoon of flour is the one quantity Ranhofer states explicitly per set. Four ounces of butter is generous by modern taste; two will brown the meat adequately, especially since the salt pork renders its own fat.
Blanching the salt porkSimmer the diced pork in water for five minutes and drain before frying. Salt pork of the period was often much saltier than today's; with modern pancetta or a mild slab bacon you can skip this, but then salt the dish only at the end.
Stock No. 194a and the wineThat cross-reference is to one of Ranhofer's stocks; an unsalted chicken or veal broth is the equivalent. No volumes are given for either liquid; use enough to barely cover, roughly two cups stock to half a cup dry white wine per set of giblets.
"Let the flour cook for one second"Read this as "do not let it colour." Stir the flour into the fat for thirty seconds or so, long enough to lose the raw taste, then moisten. This is a white ragout, not a brown one.
Carrots cut pear-shapeTurning vegetables into small tapered ovals is decorative and also makes them cook evenly. Small whole carrots or thick batons do the job; the shape matters only for the presentation Ranhofer describes.
The peasA pint of shelled fresh peas boiled a further half hour will be olive-drab and mealy. Add frozen peas in the last five minutes instead, and if you want them to hold the shape the recipe implies, cook them separately and scatter them over at the end.
YieldThe giblets of a duck, with the onions, carrots and peas, make a modest dish; scale up with two or three sets for a supper for four -- a course in Ranhofer's scheme, a main dish in ours.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, and it is one of the book's franker gestures toward economy. Abatis (more often spelled abattis) is the French kitchen term for the trimmings of a bird -- neck, wing tips, gizzard, heart, liver, feet -- and a la menagere, "housekeeper's style," signals a plain, homely treatment. Stewing necks and wings with salt pork, small onions, turned carrots and peas is essentially a fricassee pattern applied to offcuts. The presence of such a recipe alongside Ranhofer's truffled and aspic-glazed set pieces is a reminder that professional kitchens of the period wasted very little.