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Ducks
Miss S. P.
When roasted, use dressing as for turkey, with the addition of a few slices of onion. Many cooks lay over the game slices of onions, which take away the fishy flavour, removing the onion before serving. Make a sauce with the drippings in the pan in which the game is roasted, and to which are put the chopped giblets, which are previously well cooked; thicken the gravy with brown flour, moistened with water. Serve with currant jelly.
A method note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already know how to roast a bird and how to make a bread dressing for turkey. The instructions are aimed at wild duck, which behaves nothing like the fatty farmed birds now sold.
- The hinge: onion as a deodoriserThe sliced onion laid over the breast is there to mask the muddy, fishy taste that fish-eating wild ducks pick up. It is discarded before serving and never becomes part of the sauce. If you are cooking a farmed Pekin or Moulard duck, this step is pointless and the onion will only steam and pale the skin.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, and the ranges of the period were not thermostatted, so no Fahrenheit figure can be read back into this recipe. For modern cooking: wild duck is usually roasted fast and hot, around 450F for 20 to 30 minutes for a mallard-sized bird; a domestic duck wants 325 to 350F for 2 to 2 1/2 hours so the thick fat layer renders out, with the skin finished at high heat.
- DonenessWild duck is traditionally served with the breast pink, around 135F, because the meat is lean and turns liverish and dry when fully cooked. Farmed duck legs and thighs need 175F or higher to become tender; the USDA figure for poultry is 165F.
- Stuffing the birdA turkey dressing packed into a duck cavity will not reach a safe temperature before the breast overcooks. Bake the dressing separately in a dish, or use only a loose aromatic filling of onion and herbs that is thrown away.
- "Brown flour"Flour toasted dry in a skillet or oven until nut-coloured, then moistened with water to a smooth paste. Toasting weakens its thickening power, so more is needed than of raw flour, and it contributes a darker colour and toasted flavour to the gravy.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and neck, simmered until tender before chopping; the liver goes in only at the end or it turns grainy and bitter. The simmering liquid can be saved to loosen the pan gravy. Skim any fat before serving.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, served cold alongside, not stirred into the sauce. It was a common nineteenth-century accompaniment to dark game; tart cranberry or a sharp cherry preserve does the same job.
- YieldOne wild duck serves one or two; a 5 lb farmed duck serves three to four. Plan the dressing and gravy accordingly, as the original gives no quantities at all.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from recipes solicited from contributors, this page signed only with initials, "Miss S. P.", which is why it reads like one woman's advice passed along verbatim rather than a tested formula. The duck in question is a wild one: the whole point of the onion treatment is to deal with the "fishy flavour" of ducks that feed on fish and marsh mud, a problem that never arises with a grain-fed bird from a market. Wild ducks were an ordinary part of the North American table in this period, sold by the brace in city markets and eaten in enormous numbers before migratory bird protection laws arrived in the early twentieth century; the canvasback, prized for its celery-fed sweetness, commanded prices that later cookbooks still mention wistfully. Currant jelly with game is an older English convention, generally traced to the same taste for sweet-sour accompaniments that put verjuice and sour fruit alongside roast meat well before sugar was cheap.