No. 2059

Mallard Ducks Roasted and Broiled—

Canards Sauvages, Mallard Rotis et Grilles

Draw two singed and clean Mallard ducks, wipe out the insides with a cloth and fill the empty space with some bread dressing combined with butter or chopped suet, thyme, bay leaf, parsley, and a few finely sliced green celery leaves, adding egg-yolks; truss (No. 179), and run a skewer through to fasten them on the spit, then roast basting over with melted butter or oil. The fire should be quite brisk, and if so, twenty minutes will be sufficient to cook them. Dish them up with sliced lemons around, and serve the gravy separately.

Broiled.—Mallard ducks are broiled and dressed the same as canvasback, the only difference to be observed is perhaps a modification in the time of cooking.

← No. 2058 Canvasback Ducks with Orange Juice, Port Win Wild Duck & Waterfowl No. 2060 Mallard Ducks with Celery half-Glaze-Roasted →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a spit before an open fire and a bird that arrives whole, feathered and unshot-through. Both assumptions need translating before this works in a domestic kitchen.

The twenty minutes is the whole pointA brisk fire and twenty minutes gives a mallard that is pink to rare at the breast, which is how wild duck is meant to eat. Wild mallard has almost no fat and turns dry and livery if taken much past an internal 130-135F in the breast. Judge by temperature, not by the clock, since a spit and an oven behave differently.
"Quite brisk" in oven termsRanhofer describes a fire, not an oven, and gives no temperature; a very hot oven, roughly 450-500F, is the usual modern stand-in, with the bird raised on a rack so the heat circulates. A lower oven risks overcooking the breast before the skin colours.
Bake the dressing separatelyThe bread dressing here is bound with raw egg yolks, and in a bird that comes out of the oven rare the centre of the stuffing will not get near 165F. Use the aromatics loose in the cavity for scent and bake the egg-bound dressing in a dish alongside.
Chopped suetBeef suet is still sold by butchers and online, and it does something butter cannot: it stays solid longer and lards the dressing as it renders. Cold grated butter is the usual substitute in equal measure.
Sourcing the birdsWild mallard cannot legally be bought in the United States; it comes from a licensed hunter or not at all. Farmed mallard, sold in Britain and by some U.S. game dealers, is a different bird -- fatter, milder, and needing a few minutes longer. Check any wild bird carefully for shot.
Trussing and the spitThe cross-reference to No. 179 is Ranhofer's general trussing method; in practice, tie the legs together and pin the wings to the body so nothing flaps in the heat. A skewer through the bird is a rotisserie fitting and can be ignored if you are roasting in a pan.
Green celery leavesRanhofer does not say which leaves; the pale inner leaves from the heart are the more aromatic and less bitter choice, while the dark outer leaves are coarser and better kept for stock.
BroiledThe cross-reference to canvasback points to the broiling treatment in No. 2058, which for a bird of this size normally means splitting down the back, flattening and grilling over high heat, breast side finished last. A mallard is leaner than a canvasback, which is presumably the "modification in the time" he leaves unstated.
YieldTwo mallards serve four as a main course, or two if the birds are small. Slice the lemon thin -- it is a garnish and an acid to squeeze, not a sauce.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years running the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and its wild-duck chapter reads as a catalogue of a bird trade that no longer exists. Market gunners shipped ducks by the barrel from the Chesapeake and the Illinois River to city restaurants, and the birds were graded and priced by species: canvasback at the top, fattened on wild celery, with mallard a good notch below -- which is why Ranhofer gives the canvasback its own elaborate treatments with port and orange and disposes of the mallard in a paragraph that ends by referring back to them. Commercial hunting of migratory waterfowl was progressively shut down in the United States by a series of measures, the Lacey Act of 1900 restricting interstate traffic in illegally taken game and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 finally ending the market trade, so within a generation of this book the whole supply chain behind the recipe was gone. The bread dressing with thyme, bay and celery leaf is an older and plainer English idea sitting inside a French-titled recipe, which is roughly what Delmonico's was: French technique feeding an American room.