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Ruddy Duck, Roasted
Carefully pick all over two fine, fat ruddy ducks. Draw and neatly wipe the inside of the birds with a towel. Season the inside of each with two saltspoons salt well divided. Run in the head of each from the end of the neck to back with a small branch celery. Truss them nicely. Lay them in a roasting pan. Season with a teaspoon salt over each. Spread a teaspoon melted fat on the breasts of the birds. Place in the oven to roast for eighteen minutes. Remove, untruss, place on a hot dish, remove the celery, throw a teaspoon hot water inside each bird, then serve with six slices hominy around the dish and currant jelly separately.
Filippini assumes a small, dark-fleshed wild duck, a coal-hot oven and a cook who knows that eighteen minutes means rare. Almost everything that needs translating here is unstated rather than archaic.
- The bird itselfRuddy duck is a small diving duck, well under a pound and a half dressed. It is a migratory game bird: it cannot legally be bought or sold in the United States, and taking one requires a licence and an open season. In practice this recipe is made with a legally taken wild duck of similar size, or with two teal, or scaled up for a domestic duck.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because there was no dial. Eighteen minutes for a bird this size implies a very hot oven, 475-500F, which is still how small wild ducks are handled.
- Eighteen minutes means rareThat timing leaves the breast red at the bone, which is the point of the dish. Wild waterfowl cooked to well done goes dry and livery. If rare poultry is not something you serve, this is the wrong recipe rather than one to extend.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two per cavity is roughly half a teaspoon. The teaspoon of salt rubbed over the outside of each bird is generous by modern taste; a scant half teaspoon is closer to current seasoning.
- The celery in the neckThe line is obscure, referring to the head as well as the neck, but the sense appears to be that a small stalk of celery is run into the bird from the neck end. Whatever the exact placement, the recipe directs that it be removed before serving, so it is a flavouring rather than a stuffing.
- Melted fatRead this as clarified butter, duck fat or bacon fat. A teaspoon per bird is barely enough to keep the thin breast skin from scorching at that heat; a tablespoon is more useful.
- The teaspoon of hot waterPoured into the cavity after untrussing, it loosens the set juices so they run out over the platter. It is a sauce in miniature, and it works.
- HominyNot canned whole hominy but cooked hominy or coarse grits, poured into a pan, chilled firm, sliced and fried or grilled, which is what "six slices" implies -- a common American accompaniment to game birds at the time. Six slices for two birds.
- YieldTwo ducks of this size serve two people, or four as a first course. The currant jelly goes on the table in a small dish, never on the bird.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to the American restaurant cult of wild waterfowl that peaked in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Canvasback and redhead were the aristocrats of that trade; the ruddy duck, sold in city markets under names including butterball and bull-neck, was the cheaper but well-regarded alternative. Market hunting on that scale is what the ruddy duck's presence on a hotel menu really records, and it is why the dish reads as a period document now: the Lacey Act of 1900 restricted interstate traffic in wild birds, but market hunting was not finished until the Weeks-McLean Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1913-18, roughly a generation after this book's publication, and the birds have been managed as sport-hunted game ever since. The trimmings -- fried hominy and currant jelly, the bird barely cooked through -- were the fixed grammar of American game service, applied to snipe, plover and canvasback alike.