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Mallard Ducks, Currant Jelly
Prepare two nice, fat Mallard ducks exactly the same as redhead ducks and serve with currant jelly.
This is a cross-reference entry: the whole method lives in the preceding redhead duck recipe, and what remains here is the bird and the sauce. A few things about wild duck have changed since it was written.
- The method it points toThe redhead entry in this book carries the whole method; the book itself gives no oven temperature. Modern practice for wild duck is a hot, fast roast so the breast stays pink and the lean flesh does not dry out. Follow the redhead entry in this book rather than any recipe written for farmed Pekin duck, which is fattier and wants a long, slow render.
- Wild birds are not on saleMallard has not been legally sold as wild game in the United States since the market-hunting era ended; a wild bird means a hunter's bird, in season and under licence. Farmed mallard (sometimes sold as Rouen or "wild-flavoured" duck) is available from game dealers and is the practical substitute, though it carries more fat and a milder taste.
- Two ducks, how many peopleA dressed wild mallard runs roughly 1.5 to 2 lb and yields a modest amount of breast and leg. Two birds will serve two generously, or four as part of a larger meal; a farmed mallard of 2.5-3 lb will stretch further.
- Doneness and the pink-breast questionTraditional game cookery serves the breast rare to medium-rare. Public health guidance for all poultry, wild or farmed, is 165F throughout. Cooked to that point the breast will be grey and firm, which is why many cooks carve the breast off and cook it separately from the legs.
- Lead shotBirds taken with lead shot may carry fragments and shot channels through the meat; lead shot has been prohibited for waterfowl hunting in the United States since 1991, so this applies chiefly to older or non-US birds. Feel the breast before cooking and remove what you find.
- Barding the lean birdWild mallard has almost no subcutaneous fat. A sheet of bacon or salt pork over the breast, or a rub of butter, keeps it from drying in a very hot oven — standard practice in this period and still worth doing.
- The currant jellyRed currant jelly is what is meant; the bare instruction to 'serve with' suggests a dish alongside rather than a cooked sauce, though the book does not say. Commercial red currant jelly is close to what is intended; grape or cranberry jelly is not, being sweeter and without the sharp edge that carries the fat of the bird.
Filippini's book was compiled when wild waterfowl was still a restaurant commodity in America: market hunters supplied hotels and dining rooms by the barrel, and menus ranked the birds by flavour, with canvasback and redhead at the top — their taste credited to the wild celery they fed on in the Chesapeake — and mallard just below them as the abundant, reliable choice. That trade is why a cookbook could treat "two nice, fat Mallard ducks" as an ordinary purchase, and why the entry needs no method of its own beyond a nod to the redhead recipe. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 ended the commercial sale of wild ducks in the United States, though the Lacey Act of 1900 and the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913 had already curtailed the trade; together they are why this recipe reads as remote today rather than routine. The currant jelly is the older half of the dish: tart red currant preserve served with game and mutton is documented in English cookery well before this book, and it survived into American practice as the near-automatic accompaniment to any dark-fleshed bird.