Home › The World's Kitchen › Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce
Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce
Cut off the head and legs, singe, draw, neatly wipe and truss a fine, tender duckling of about five pounds, keeping the livers. Place in a small roasting pan with half gill water, half ounce butter, well divided over the bird; sprinkle one teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper over it. Set it in a moderate oven to roast for fifty minutes; turn it several times while roasting to get a good brown colour all around, not failing to baste it occasionally with its own gravy. Remove it from the oven, untruss, dress on a hot dish. Skim the fat from the surface of the gravy. Strain the gravy over the duck, decorate the dish with watercress, and send to the table with apple sauce separately.
A plain roast duck from an era when birds arrived whole and undrawn. The instructions are sound apart from the timing, which will not get a five-pound duck where it needs to be.
- The timing is the problemFifty minutes in a moderate oven will not render the fat under a duck's skin or bring the legs to tenderness. A five-pound bird wants something closer to an hour and three-quarters to two hours; go by temperature, with the thigh joint at 170-175F, rather than by the clock.
- Moderate ovenUsually reckoned at about 350F, though "moderate" is variously given as 350-375F. One common modern approach starts a duck hotter, around 425F for the first twenty minutes, then drops to 325-350F for the remainder to melt the fat without scorching the skin.
- Half a gill of waterIn American books a gill is reckoned at half a cup, so this is about 1/4 cup (the imperial gill is larger, 5 fl oz) — just enough to keep the pan from smoking at the start. It will boil off, and once the duck's own fat renders you will not need more.
- Fat, and a great deal of itA duck can throw off a cup or more of fat. Set the bird on a rack so it is not stewing in it, and pour the fat off partway through rather than trying to skim a full pan at the end. Save it; it keeps for months in the refrigerator and is the best possible medium for potatoes.
- Pricking the skinThe original relies on turning the bird for colour. Scoring or pricking the skin over the breast and thighs, without cutting into the meat, does more to release the subcutaneous fat and crisp the skin than any amount of turning.
- "Draw" and "truss"Drawing means removing the innards, which a supermarket duck arrives without. Trussing simply means tying the legs and wings close to the body with string so the bird holds its shape. Cut off the head and legs applies to a bird bought from a poulterer with both still attached.
- The liversThe recipe tells you to keep them and then never uses them. Chop and brown them and add to the strained gravy, or set them aside for another dish.
- White pepperUsed here so no dark flecks show on the pale gravy. Black pepper will do the job if the flecks do not concern you, though the two are not identical in flavour; white pepper is earthier.
- YieldA five-pound duck is a smaller amount of meat than the weight suggests, most of it breast and leg over a heavy frame. Count on three, generously four.
Duck with apple sauce is a fat-and-acid pairing: the sharp fruit cuts the richness the same way it does with roast pork or goose, and the combination is long established in Northern European cooking. That the sauce here is "sent to the table separately" rather than spooned over is a mark of the formal service this book assumes — sauces travelled in boats, and the bird went out whole, garnished with watercress, to be carved in the room. "Duckling" is doing real work in the title: it means a young bird of a few months, tender enough to roast quickly, as against an older duck that needed braising or the stockpot. In the United States in this period a five-pound roasting duckling was likely to be a Pekin, the breed generally traced to birds brought from China in the 1870s and raised in such quantity on Long Island that the name of the place became the name of the bird.