No. 1941

Duckling, with Bigarade Sauce

Caneton a la Sauce Bigarade

Make a small hash with some fresh pork, the duck's liver and two cooked chicken livers; mix into it a handful of white bread-crumbs, one egg-yolk and two or three spoonfuls of mushrooms, onions and parsley all minced very fine. With this preparation fill a duck's stomach; sew up the apertures, truss and roast it on the spit or in the oven, basting liberally with butter. Drain and dress it on a dish with some clear gravy (No. 404), and serve a bigarade sauce (No. 435) separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have his sauce and gravy numbers to hand and a spit turning by the fire. The dish itself is straightforward roast stuffed duck; the two things that need attention are the bitter-orange sauce and the temperature of a meat stuffing.

BigaradeThe sauce takes its name from the bigarade, the bitter Seville orange, not the sweet eating orange. A workable substitute is the juice and blanched zest of Seville oranges when in season, or sweet orange juice sharpened with lemon; the sauce should read as bitter and acid against the fat of the duck.
Cross-referencesNo. 404 is Ranhofer's clear gravy and No. 435 his bigarade sauce; neither is reproduced here. A well-reduced brown poultry jus and a bitter-orange gastrique will stand in.
"Duck's stomach"This means the body cavity. The forcemeat goes inside the bird, not into an actual stomach; "sew up the apertures" refers to the vent and the neck opening.
A small hashFresh pork here means raw, unsalted, unsmoked pork with some fat in it; shoulder works well. Ranhofer gives no quantity. Chop or coarsely grind rather than pureeing, or the stuffing turns to paste.
Stuffing temperatureA raw pork and liver forcemeat inside a bird is the one point that needs a thermometer. The centre of the stuffing must reach 165F, which usually happens well after the duck breast has passed the point most cooks want. Roasting the forcemeat separately in a small dish or terrine solves this and lets the duck come out at 165F in the thigh.
Oven and timingRanhofer gives no temperature. For a modern oven rather than the spit, 425F for 20 minutes to set the skin, then 350F, allowing roughly 20 minutes per pound for a stuffed bird; a 4-5 lb duckling comes to something between an hour and twenty minutes and an hour and forty. Go by thermometer, not the clock.
Basting with butterDuck renders a great deal of its own fat, so the butter is optional and mostly a nineteenth-century flourish for colour. Prick the skin over the breast and legs and pour off the fat as it collects, or the bird sits in a pool and the skin will not crisp.
YieldA duckling of this size serves two generously or three modestly, with the forcemeat carved alongside.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially the French classical repertoire as it was served to Americans who could afford it. Sauce bigarade is one of the oldest of the orange sauces for waterfowl: the bigarade orange, a sour variety generally traced to Arab cultivation around the Mediterranean and long grown in Provence, reached French kitchens well before the sweet orange, and bitter juice with duck is documented in French cookery long before the modern restaurant era. What distinguishes Ranhofer's version from the modern restaurant standard is the stuffing: a pork-and-liver hash bound with crumbs and yolk, closer to a farce for a terrine than to a bread stuffing. The instruction to roast "on the spit or in the oven" is a small marker of date, written when both were still live options in a professional kitchen.