No. 1937

Duckling a la Rouennaise

Caneton a la Rouennaise

Chop up half a pound of onions, blanch, then fry in butter; chop up also half a pound of chicken livers, and half a pound of leaf lard, each one separately; mingle all together, and when very hot thicken with six egg-yolks; add four ounces of bread-crumbs to this preparation, some chopped parsley, and finely cut up chives. Remove the breastbone from a duck and fill the empty space with the above; truss for roasting and wrap it up in buttered paper, and roast for about half an hour. Serve it on a little clear gravy (No. 404), and have a sauce-boatful of the following sauce: Cut up two ounces of onions in one-eighth of an inch squares; cook them in salted water, drain and return them to a saucepan to moisten with red wine; when this has fallen to a glaze dilute it with espagnole sauce (No. 414).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer wrote for a professional brigade with a stockpot always going, so this reads as a sketch rather than a set of instructions. Two cross-referenced sauces and an unstated oven temperature need filling in before you start.

The hinge: the bird is meant to be rareHalf an hour is a short roast, which suits the Rouen style; the breast should be rosy and the juices pink. A hot oven is implied by the timing, but Ranhofer gives no temperature in this recipe and no oven term is used.
But the stuffing is the limiting factorChicken-liver farce carries the usual poultry-liver pathogen risk and it sits in the coldest part of a rare bird. Bring the farce fully up to temperature in the pan before it goes in, and check it reads 165F at the centre when the duck comes out; if it does not, the duck is done and the stuffing is not.
Leaf lardThe hard kidney fat of the pig, sold rendered or as fresh fat by good butchers. Fresh unrendered leaf lard is what is meant here — it melts into the farce and keeps it moist. Fatback, or an equal weight of fresh pork belly fat, does the same job.
The two sauce referencesNo. 414 is espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on veal stock and brown roux. No. 404 is Ranhofer's clear gravy; its composition is given elsewhere in the book, not here. A well-reduced brown stock, lightly thickened, stands in for both; without them the dish has no base at all.
Buttered paperParchment, buttered on the side facing the bird, tied or tucked over the breast. It keeps the skin from taking too much colour in a hot oven during a short roast. Foil is not the same thing — it steams the skin.
Removing the breastboneCut out the keel from inside the cavity, leaving the rib cage and skin intact, so the farce fills the breast and the bird carves in clean slices. A butcher will do it if asked for a duck boned at the breast.
Quantities and yieldThe farce comes to well over a pound and a half, plus crumbs and yolks — likely more than a single duckling will hold. Bake any excess separately in a buttered dish. Ranhofer states neither the size of the bird nor the number served.
The sauceTwo ounces of onion cut in eighth-inch dice, blanched in salted water, then reduced with red wine to a glaze before the espagnole goes in. Do not brown the onion; the blanching is there to keep it sweet and pale.

A Little History

Canard à la rouennaise takes its name from the Rouen duck, a Norman breed traditionally killed by smothering rather than bleeding so that the flesh stays dark and full of blood, and served very rare. The full Paris restaurant version, generally credited to Frederic Delair at the Tour d'Argent in the 1890s and also associated with the Hôtel de la Couronne, finishes the sauce with the carcass crushed in a silver press to extract the blood. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives the other half of the tradition: the boned breast filled with a liver-and-onion farce, roasted hard and fast, with a red wine and onion sauce built on espagnole.