No. 2052

Blackhead Ducks Roasted or Broiled

Canards Sauvages a Tete Noire Rotis ou Grilles

Pick the feathers from two blackhead ducks, and truss as described (No. 179); fasten them on the spit then cook the ducks, if fine and large for fourteen or eighteen minutes before a bright fire. Untruss and serve them to the guests after cutting them up on very hot plates; serve currant jelly at the same time. For broiled blackheads see broiled canvasback ducks (No. 2054).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a spit, a coal fire, and a market where wild duck could be bought by the brace. The method still works in an oven, but almost everything around it has changed.

What a blackhead isThe market name for scaup, greater or lesser (Aythya marila and A. affinis), diving ducks that were shipped to East Coast markets in bulk by market gunners. These are small birds, roughly 1.5-2 lb live and appreciably less dressed, so plan on one duck per person, or half a large one alongside other courses.
You cannot buy oneThe sale of wild-shot waterfowl has been illegal in the United States since the early twentieth century. This recipe is now only for hunters; farmed duck is a different bird entirely, fatter, milder, and needing a longer, lower roast to render the fat.
Oven instead of spitSet the oven as high as it goes, 500F, and roast breast up on a rack in a preheated shallow pan. Fifteen to twenty minutes gets a large scaup to about 125-130F in the breast, which is about what fourteen to eighteen minutes before a bright fire would have produced. Ranhofer gives no temperature of any kind.
This will be rareWild duck cooked this way is red at the breastbone and the juices run pink. That is the tradition and it is what the timing is for, but it is well below the 165F the USDA specifies for poultry. Cook wild birds through if anyone at the table is pregnant, elderly, very young, or immunocompromised, and handle raw waterfowl with the same care you would raw chicken.
The legs are the problemScaup legs are worked muscle and stay tough at breast doneness. Carve off the breasts to serve, then braise or confit the legs separately rather than trying to make one cooking time serve both.
Trussing (No. 179)Ranhofer cross-refers to his trussing instructions elsewhere in the book. In practice that means wings folded under and legs drawn against the body and tied; a single loop of butcher's twine round the legs and tail is enough. The point is to keep the bird compact for even fast heat, not decorative.
Very hot platesNot a flourish. Rare duck is thin-fleshed and chills in a minute, and the fat congeals unpleasantly. Warm plates and the carving board, and carve at speed.
Currant jellyRed currant jelly, served cold in a small dish alongside, was a common American accompaniment to wild duck. A sharp fruit jelly or a lightly sweetened cranberry or damson preserve stands in for it.
Off-flavoursScaup are mollusk and crustacean feeders and can carry a strong, fishy taste that canvasback fed on wild celery does not. Hunters commonly trim the skin and cavity fat before roasting to reduce it, and generally reckon birds taken from clean fresh water milder than coastal ones.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its wild duck chapter reads like a market list from a vanished era: canvasback, redhead, brant, doe birds, blackhead, each with its own entry. Blackhead sat near the bottom of that hierarchy. Chesapeake and Long Island gunners shipped scaup to the city by the barrel, and because the birds fed heavily on shellfish they were reckoned coarser eating than the celery-fed canvasback; Ranhofer gives them four lines and sends the reader to the canvasback entry for the broiling method. The whole trade this recipe depends on was shut down within a generation: the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended commercial hunting of migratory waterfowl, and dishes like this one passed out of restaurant cooking and into the hands of hunters, where they remain.