Home › The World's Kitchen › Broiled Mallard Ducks, Orange Sauce
Broiled Mallard Ducks, Orange Sauce
Pick and singe two fine, fat Mallard ducks, cut off necks and feet, split open through back without separating, neatly draw, then wrap in a coarse towel and neatly flatten with a cleaver. Mix on a plate two tablespoons oil, a teaspoon celery salt and half teaspoon black pepper, repeatedly turn ducks in it, arrange on a double broiler and broil for seven minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish with six freshly prepared toasts, spread a half tablespoon butter over, decorate with a little watercress, six quarters lemon and serve with an orange sauce separately.
A game-bird recipe from the era when wild duck was still sold over the counter. The method is sound, but almost every element of the equipment and supply chain has changed.
- The hinge: do not cook it throughSeven minutes a side over a hot fire leaves the breast rare to medium-rare, which is the whole point of a mallard. Wild duck breast is lean, dark and dries to liver-like toughness the moment it passes medium; the legs, by contrast, want long slow cooking and are the weak part of any broiled duck.
- Sourcing the birdsIn the United States wild mallard cannot legally be bought; it comes from a licensed hunter under a migratory-bird season. In Britain wild mallard can be bought in season from a game dealer. Farmed mallard is sold as a substitute and is fatter and milder than the bird Filippini meant.
- ShotAny wild-shot bird may carry lead pellets and lead fragments along the wound channel. Feel over the breast before cooking and be careful eating; official advice in both countries is that game shot with lead is best not fed to children or pregnant women.
- "Split open through back without separating"The bird is cut open down the back and opened out flat, still in one piece; wrapping it in a coarse towel and striking it with a cleaver cracks the breastbone so it lies level on the grill.
- "Neatly draw"Eviscerate. Birds bought from a game dealer often arrive undrawn and still in feather, so the picking and singeing at the head of the recipe is literal work, not a flourish.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. A double broiler is a hinged wire basket that clamps the flattened bird between two grids so it can be turned in one motion over coals. A grill basket does the same job; under a domestic overhead broiler, set the rack close and turn the bird by hand.
- Celery saltStill sold. A teaspoon across two ducks, with no other salt in the recipe, is the entire seasoning; taste the oil mixture before you turn the birds in it.
- The toastsSix pieces of plain toasted bread served with the birds; the recipe does not say whether they go under the ducks to catch the juices or beside them, nor whether the half tablespoon of butter is spread over the toast or the birds.
- Orange sauce and yieldFilippini expects you to turn to his separate sauce entry for the orange sauce; the type is the classic bitter-orange sauce built on stock, pan juices, orange juice and zest. The recipe gives no yield, though six toasts and six lemon quarters suggest it was plated for more than two.
The International Cook Book (1906) came from Alexander Filippini, long a chef, steward and manager at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits squarely in the American restaurant taste of the 1880s and 1890s, when wild ducks—canvasback above all, but mallard, teal and redhead too—were market game shipped by the barrel from the Chesapeake and the Mississippi flyway and served rare in every serious dining room. Pairing duck with a sharp orange sauce is generally traced to the French sauce bigarade, built on the bitter Seville orange rather than the sweet fruit, and it survives in the dish most people now know as canard à l'orange. What dates the recipe is not the sauce but the assumption that anyone could buy two fat mallard: commercial market hunting of waterfowl was ended in the United States by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, and wild duck largely left the restaurant menu, surviving where hunters supply it and in the farmed mallard sold openly today.