No. 2067
Teal Ducks, Broiled
Canards Sauvages, Sarcelles Grillees
A two-line recipe that assumes a cook who already knows how to handle small wild ducks. The whole thing turns on heat and timing: a teal is a tiny bird, and a minute too long ruins it.
- The hinge: cook it fast and rareA split teal over a hot fire needs roughly 3-4 minutes skin side down and 2-3 minutes on the bone side, breast pulled at about 130-135F for pink meat. Wild duck breast taken past medium turns dry and livery, which is the fault this whole method exists to avoid.
- "Mignonette"Mignonette pepper is coarsely cracked peppercorns, traditionally white, not fine ground. Crack them under a pan bottom rather than using a grinder's coarse setting.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire broiling basket that clamps the split bird flat between two grids so it can be turned in one motion. A modern folding fish grill does the same job; the instruction not to clamp too tight presumably keeps the bird from being crushed and the skin from tearing when the grids are opened.
- "A brisk fire"Direct, high heat — hardwood coals burned down to a red glow, or a gas grill run at full. Indoors, a cast-iron grill pan over high heat with the broiler element on above it approximates it.
- Gravy No. 404Ranhofer's cross-reference is to a gravy recipe given elsewhere in the book. A modern stand-in is a duck or veal demi-glace reduced with the chopped teal backbones, strained and mounted with butter.
- Splitting the birdThe recipe halves the bird lengthwise through the back, so cut down through the backbone with kitchen shears and separate it into two pieces. "Pare" covers tidying the halves -- wing tips and the oil gland at the tail base.
- Shot and feathersWild-shot birds carry pellets and pinfeathers. Run your fingers over the breast for shot before cooking and singe or tweeze the remaining quills; both are far easier to deal with before the bird hits the fire.
- YieldA teal is a very small duck, well under a pound dressed, so one split bird per person as a course, two if it is the main dish.
- SourcingTeal cannot be bought at a market in the United States; the sale of wild-taken migratory waterfowl is prohibited. The recipe is now a recipe for hunters, or for farmed duck breast handled the same way.
This is entry 2067 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it sits in a long run of wild duck preparations — canvasback, redhead, ruddy duck, teal — that reflects how ordinary wildfowl was on a nineteenth-century American restaurant menu. Market hunters supplied the cities in bulk, and a diner could order canvasback or teal the way one now orders steak; that trade was shut down by the Lacey Act and then the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which is why the same page reads today as a hunter's note rather than a restaurant recipe. Teal, the smallest of the North American dabbling ducks, was prized for its mild flesh, and its size explains the technique: too small to roast without drying, it is split and grilled over fierce heat in minutes. The French title, sarcelles grillées, reflects Ranhofer's habit throughout the book — he generally gives dishes in both languages, a Delmonico's kitchen speaking French and serving America's game.