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Broiled Duckling, Orange Marmalade
Remove head and feet from a tender medium duckling, split open without separating, draw, then envelop it in a coarse towel and gently flatten with a cleaver. Season with teaspoon salt, half saltspoon pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Rub all around with a tablespoon oil, then arrange on a double broiler and broil twelve minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish over six freshly prepared slices of toast, spread a maitre d'hotel butter over, and serve with six tablespoons orange marmalade, separately.
A spatchcocked duckling cooked over direct heat, finished with a compound butter and served with marmalade on the side. Almost everything here works today except the timing, which assumes a small bird and a fierce fire.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwelve minutes a side under a domestic broiler will leave the thighs of a whole duckling well short of done. Take the bird to 165F at the thickest part of the thigh, moving it to a 400F oven once the skin has coloured if the surface is browning faster than the interior.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is a scant 1/8 teaspoon of pepper and 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg for the whole bird.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. It is a hinged wire grill basket that clamps the flattened bird between two grids so it can be turned in one motion. A rack set over a sheet pan under an oven broiler does the same job; tongs replace the hinge.
- Duckling sizeA "tender medium duckling" of the period was probably somewhere in the region of 3 1/2 to 5 lb dressed, broadly comparable to a supermarket Pekin duck, though the terms were never standardised. Anything much larger is better roasted than broiled.
- Drawing and flatteningBirds arrive drawn today, so ignore that step. The flattening still matters: the recipe splits the bird open without separating it, then presses it flat, and a flattened bird cooks evenly instead of leaving the legs raw.
- Fat and flare-upsDuck renders heavily and dripping fat under a broiler will smoke and can catch. Keep a pan beneath to collect it, pour it off partway through, and prick the skin over the fat deposits before cooking.
- Maitre d'hotel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. About 4 tablespoons of butter to a tablespoon of parsley and a teaspoon of juice is the usual proportion.
- YieldSix slices of toast and six tablespoons of marmalade suggest six servings, which is optimistic for one duckling. Treat it as three or four portions, or cook two birds.
Duck with orange is old enough that its origins are argued rather than documented: the pairing is generally traced to Renaissance Italy and reached the French repertoire as caneton a l'orange, while a rival tradition credits it to Florentine cooks in the retinue of Catherine de' Medici, which is a story often repeated and rarely evidenced. What is distinctive here is the marmalade, a British preserve of Seville bitter oranges, served cold and separately rather than reduced into a sauce -- a French method and an English condiment sitting happily on the same plate. Broiling a split duckling, rather than roasting it whole, was a way of getting a bird to the table quickly for a la carte service, over coal or charcoal.