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Duckling Braise with Cherries
Cut off the head and feet from a fine tender duckling of four pounds; singe, draw, wipe and truss. Season with a teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon pepper, two saltspoons ground cinnamon and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover the bird all around with very thin slices of larding pork. Tie it around with string and keep on a plate. Finely slice one carrot, one turnip, one onion, two branches celery, one bean garlic, two branches parsley and one ounce raw lean ham; place these in a braising pan with half ounce butter, a bay leaf, two cloves, a sprig each thyme and mace; then lay the duck over, set in the oven to roast for thirty minutes, turning it once in a while. Pour over one gill white wine, one gill demi-glace and one gill tomato sauce. Lightly mix, cover the pan, reset in the oven for twenty-five minutes longer, remove, dress on a hot dish, untie, remove the lard, untruss and keep hot. Skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, strain it through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan and let boil.
Remove the stems and stones from a pint of fresh cherries, add the cherries to the sauce with two tablespoons sherry, then briskly boil for ten minutes. Pour the sauce over the duckling, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve. N. B. Place the left-over vegetables into the demi-glace pot.
A classic braise built on a professional kitchen's standing stockpot, written for cooks who had demi-glace on hand. The translation problems are mostly units, larder items and the oven temperature the author never gives.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the wine, demi-glace and tomato sauce are half a cup each. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: two saltspoons of cinnamon is half a teaspoon, and one of nutmeg is a quarter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ovens of the period were not routinely fitted with reliable thermometers and the cook was expected to judge the heat. Start the uncovered browning stage at about 425F, then drop to 325-350F once the liquid goes in and the pan is covered.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockFifty-five minutes total is optimistic for a four-pound bird. Take the thigh to 170-175F, which lets the leg connective tissue soften; the breast will be past pink, which is what a braise is for.
- Larding porkWhat is meant is barding: thin sheets of fresh unsmoked pork fat (fatback) wrapped around the bird and tied. Thinly sliced unsmoked streaky bacon or salt pork blanched to draw the salt is the practical substitute. Duck carries plenty of its own fat, so the barding is chiefly there to keep the breast from drying in the first thirty minutes.
- Demi-glaceHalf a cup of real demi-glace: classically espagnole sauce and brown stock reduced together, in short a proper reduced brown sauce rather than a bouillon cube. Reduce a good unsalted brown stock by half, or use a commercial demi-glace concentrate; the closing note about returning the vegetables to the demi-glace pot suggests a kitchen keeping a stockpot going continuously.
- Two puzzles in the herb listA "bean garlic" is one clove. A "sprig of mace" cannot be right, as mace is the dried husk of nutmeg; either a blade of mace or a sprig of marjoram was intended, and marjoram fits the sequence with thyme.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works; press the vegetables lightly rather than pushing them through, or the sauce turns cloudy.
- The cherriesSour cherries suit this better than sweet ones. Ten minutes at a brisk boil is there to reduce the sauce, not to cook the fruit, so watch the consistency and pull it when it coats a spoon; the cherries should still hold their shape.
- YieldA four-pound duckling serves three, four if the meal has other substantial courses.
Duck with cherries belongs to the same French repertoire that gave us duck with orange and duck with olives: a rich, fatty bird cut with something sharp and fruity. The method here is a true braise rather than a roast, and the tell is the bed of sliced carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley and raw ham that the bird sits on, an aromatic base of the kind sometimes called a *matignon*, though the slicing and straining are closer to mirepoix practice, and its whole purpose is to perfume the liquid and then be strained out. Much of the procedure is far from domestic. The demi-glace, the tomato sauce, the chinois and the closing instruction to tip the spent vegetables back into the demi-glace pot all assume a brigade kitchen where stocks are perpetual and nothing is started from scratch at four in the afternoon. The gap between the professional kitchen and the household one is exactly why the oven temperature goes unmentioned: the hotel cook knew his range, and the reader was left to guess.