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Duckling, Doubleday
Carefully singe, draw and neatly wipe a tender five-pound duckling, cut off head and feet and keep liver for further use. Truss nicely and lay in a cocotte or earthen pan, pour in four tablespoons cold water, spread a very little melted butter over breast, season with a teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and set in a moderate oven to roast for an hour, frequently basting with its own gravy meanwhile. Melt an ounce of butter in a saute pan, add eight medium, sound, peeled and finely chopped shallots, an ounce finely chopped, raw, lean ham, six finely chopped mushrooms, the liver, also finely chopped up, and mix all well together while gently cooking on range for ten minutes. Sprinkle over two teaspoons Oriental curry powder, mix well with a wooden spoon, add three fresh red tomatoes strained through a sieve, season with a little salt and white pepper and cook for five minutes, lightly mixing once in a while. Bring duckling to oven door, carefully skim fat off surface of gravy, pour prepared sauce over and reset in oven to roast for thirty-five minutes longer, being careful to frequently baste it with the mixture during that time. Remove from oven, untruss and send to table in same cocotte dish, with plain, boiled, well-drained rice, over which you sprinkle a half teaspoon Oriental curry powder separately.
A roast duckling finished in a curried shallot-and-tomato sauce, from an era when birds arrived whole and undressed. Nothing here is unsafe; the main adjustments are vessel, oven number and the roasting time, which is long by current practice.
- CocotteIn 1906 a cocotte means a lidded, ovenproof casserole or deep earthenware baking dish, used here open. Any heavy Dutch oven or roasting dish that will hold a 5 lb bird and go to the table will do.
- Moderate ovenTake this as somewhere around 350F. The bird goes in at that temperature for the first hour, and returns to the same oven for the sauced finish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of white pepper is roughly 3/4 teaspoon. With a full teaspoon of salt this is a firmly seasoned bird by modern standards; scale back if you like.
- Singe and drawBoth steps are obsolete for a supermarket duck. Pull the giblet packet, reserve the liver for the sauce, and pat the bird thoroughly dry. If pinfeathers remain, tweeze them rather than passing the skin through a flame.
- Total time and donenessAn hour plus thirty-five minutes is a long haul for a 5 lb duckling. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thigh: 175F gives tender dark meat without drying the breast. Start checking at the 75-minute mark.
- The fatThe one instruction not to skip is skimming before the sauce goes on. Duck renders a great deal of fat, and if it is left in the pan the curry sauce breaks into a greasy slick instead of glazing the bird. Pour it off and save it.
- Curry powder"Oriental curry powder" was a commercial blend, likely mild and turmeric-heavy. A standard mild Madras powder is the closest match. Note that the recipe adds it to the already-cooked shallot mixture, then gives it five minutes with the sieved tomatoes.
- Tomatoes strained through a sieveThree fresh tomatoes pushed through a sieve gives roughly a cup of pulp, more or less depending on their size, with the skins and seeds left behind. Out of season, an equal volume of passata is a fair substitute.
- YieldA 5 lb duckling serves three, four at a stretch with the rice. Sprinkling extra curry powder over plain boiled rice at the table, as directed, is worth doing; it ties the side dish to the sauce.
This is one of hundreds of dishes in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book that carry a personal name, a habit he brought from decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, where naming a plate for a regular customer was both flattery and menu shorthand. Who the Doubleday of the title was is unrecorded; Filippini rarely explained his dedications, and the attributions are best read as house tradition rather than documented fact. The curry is the more revealing detail: by the 1900s commercial curry powder was a fixture in well-stocked American pantries, and chefs used it as a seasoning within the French repertoire rather than as Indian cooking, laying it over a duxelles-like mixture of shallot, ham and mushroom and serving plain rice alongside. The result belongs squarely to the Gilded Age dining room, where a familiar roast bird could be made to seem worldly with two teaspoons of spice.