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Duckling Braise, a L'Orange
Cut off head and feet from a five-pound duckling. Singe, draw, wipe and truss. Place a mirepoix at the bottom of a braising pan with an ounce butter, lay duck over it. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, then lightly baste the duck with a little melted butter. Set in oven to roast twenty-five minutes. Draw the duck to oven door, carefully peel and skin two sound juicy oranges, add the rinds to the duck with four tablespoons currant jelly, two gills demi-glace, and one gill broth. Cover pan and reset in oven forty-five minutes longer. Remove, dress bird on a large dish, untruss, then cut the peeled oranges in halves and finely slice them, remove seeds, and arrange around the dish, one overlapping another. Reduce sauce on a brisk, open fire ten minutes. Skim fat from surface. Strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over the duck and serve.
A restaurant-kitchen recipe written for cooks who already had stock pots and a sauce station going. The two things to sort out before starting are the demi-glace and the fact that the oven temperature is never stated.
- Oven heatThe original never states a temperature. For the first uncovered twenty-five minutes a hot oven, around 425F, will set the skin and start the fat rendering; drop to 325-350F for the covered braise so the sauce does not scorch.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Two gills demi-glace is one cup; one gill broth is half a cup.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced by about half -- a day's work in a home kitchen. A cup of well-reduced brown stock, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted per its label, does the same job here.
- MirepoixDiced carrot, onion and celery; the recipe gives no proportions or quantity, and something around a cup for a bird this size is enough. It is a flavour base and a rack; it is strained out at the end.
- The orange rind"Peel and skin" is best read as remove the peel and then the white pith. Only the coloured zest should go into the pan -- pith left on turns the sauce bitter over the forty-five minutes of covered braising.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the fine conical strainer. A fine-mesh sieve works; press the solids to get everything out of the mirepoix.
- DonenessSeventy minutes total for a five-pound duckling gives a well-done bird, which is how the recipe intends it. If you prefer the breast pink, check the thigh at 170F and pull the bird early, holding the sauce back on the stove -- but note that breast pulled at around 135F is well below the 165F generally recommended for poultry.
- SkimmingA duck throws a great deal of fat and the recipe's single instruction to skim is doing real work. Let the strained sauce settle a minute and spoon the fat off, or the finished dish is greasy rather than glossy.
- YieldA five-pound duckling carves for three, four at a stretch with the oranges and plenty of accompaniments.
Duck with orange is a fixture of nineteenth-century French professional cooking, where it is usually caneton à la bigarade after the bitter Seville orange that gave the classic sauce its edge; the sweet-orange-and-currant-jelly version here is a softer variant of the same idea, of a kind that crossed into hotel and restaurant menus on both sides of the Atlantic. It is often said that the pairing came to France from Italy with Catherine de' Medici, but that story is traditional rather than documented, and the more visible history is simply that ducks are fatty and acid fruit cuts fat. What dates this particular version is the demi-glace: a page that casually calls for two gills of it was written for a kitchen with a stockpot permanently on, which is exactly the world of the large restaurant kitchens that produced books like this one.