No. 2064

Redhead Ducks with Fried Celery

Canards Sauvages a Tete Rouge au Celeri Frit

Prepare and cook two redhead ducks the same as for roasting (No. 2063); dress and garnish around with celery prepared in two different ways. From four celery stalks, remove the outer branches, using only the white and tender ones; cut into four inch lengths half of the largest branches and blanch them as well as the four roots, peeled and cut in eight pieces then nicely pared; drain and put into a saucepan and cover to their height with a light ten degree syrup; cook on a slow fire, drain through a strainer and dip each separate piece into frying batter (No. 137) and fry to a fine golden color, ranging them afterward on each side of the ducks. Cut the remainder or tender stalks lengthwise into fillets the size of a straw, dip them in frying batter, then fry slowly to a fine color; drain, salt over and use them for decorating the ends of the dish. Serve separately a brown sauce (No. 414) reduced with white wine pressing into it the strained juice of an orange.

← No. 2063 Redhead Ducks, Roasted and Broiled Wild Duck & Waterfowl No. 2065 Ruddy Ducks a la Hamilton →

For the Modern Kitchen

A late-nineteenth-century garnish exercise more than a recipe: the duck is cooked as at No. 2063, and the work is all in the celery, candied then battered and fried two ways. A few of Ranhofer's shorthand terms need unpacking.

The hinge: sugar, then batterThe large branches and the roots are gently poached in light syrup before they are dipped and fried. Skip that step and you get fibrous fried celery; the syrup softens the strings and gives the crust something to caramelize against. Cook them barely tender, not translucent, or they collapse in the batter.
"Light ten degree syrup"Degrees Baume, read on a syrup hydrometer. Ten degrees is a weak syrup of roughly 18 percent sugar - about 1 cup sugar dissolved in 4 cups water is close enough for poaching.
Celery with rootsMarket celery of the period arrived with the root end intact, which is why he peels and pares four roots into eight pieces each. Modern trimmed bunches have no usable root; buy a celeriac and cut it into pieces of similar size for that half of the garnish.
The cross-referencesNo. 137 is Ranhofer's frying batter; No. 414 is Espagnole, so a good demi-glace stands in. Reduce it with white wine and finish with strained orange juice off the heat so the juice stays fresh.
Frying temperaturesThe recipe gives none; these are modern suggestions. The battered chunks do best around 350-360F to cook through without darkening. The straw-cut fillets are told only to fry "slowly" - lower, around 325F - because at full heat the thin strips brown before the batter sets.
Sourcing the birdsRedhead is a legal game duck in North America under seasonal bag limits and cannot be bought; it comes from a hunter. Farmed mallard or two teal will carry the dish, though they are fatter and milder than a diving duck.
DonenessWild diving ducks are lean and go liver-dry past medium rare. Roast hot and short, to about 130–135F in the breast, and rest the birds before carving. Farmed duck is usually taken a little further.
YieldTwo redheads serve two to four people depending on size; the celery garnish, as written, is generous for four.

A Little History

Ranhofer built The Epicurean (1894) out of thirty-odd years at Delmonico's in New York, and its wild duck chapter reflects a period when American restaurants ran on market game: canvasback, redhead, ruddy duck and teal arrived by the barrel from Chesapeake and Long Island gunners, and the redhead was priced just below the celebrated canvasback because both fed on wild celery grass in brackish water. That feeding habit is very likely the joke behind the garnish — the diving ducks of the Atlantic flyway were prized for their supposed celery flavor, so the kitchen served them ringed with actual celery, candied, battered and fried in two shapes. Market hunting on that scale was curtailed in the United States by a sequence of measures that included the Lacey Act, Weeks-McLean and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, after which dishes like this one became far rarer on restaurant menus, though farmed and imported game kept wild-duck cookery alive.