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Tame Duck Roasted
(Anatra domestica arrosto) Salt it inside and bandage all the breast with slices of bacon, large and thin. Grease with oil and salt moderately when the cooking is almost complete. If you have a wild duck grease with butter, as the meat is drier. 145
A two-sentence method that assumes you already know how to roast a bird; everything that matters here is in the barding and the late salting. The figure "145" at the end is the recipe or page number from the original book, not a temperature or a weight.
- Bandage means bard"Bandage all the breast with slices of bacon" is barding: laying thin sheets of fat over the lean breast so it bastes itself and does not dry before the legs are done. Tie them on with kitchen twine, or the slices will curl and slide off as the fat renders.
- No oven temperature is givenThe book gives none at all. As a modern starting point, around 425F for the first 20 minutes, then 350F until done, suits a domestic duck; a single unwavering moderate oven of 350F also works but gives paler skin.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockA 4-5 lb Pekin duck typically takes 1.5 to 2 hours. Duck legs want 170-175F to soften their connective tissue, while the breast is at its best nearer 155-160F. Barding helps bridge the gap between those two numbers.
- Salting lateThe instruction to salt "when the cooking is almost complete" applies to the exterior only; the cavity is salted at the start. Bacon contributes its own salt as it renders down over the breast, so season the skin sparingly at the end and taste before adding more.
- Score and drain the fatThe recipe is silent on it, but a domestic duck carries far more subcutaneous fat than a chicken. Prick or lightly score the skin over the breast and thighs before barding, and pour the rendered fat out of the pan once or twice during roasting. Keep it; it is the best possible medium for potatoes.
- Wild duck is a different birdThe note about butter is the key sentence for anyone cooking a wild mallard or teal. Wild birds are much leaner and much smaller, cook in a fraction of the time, and are traditionally served rare to medium-rare at the breast. Do not give a wild duck the timing of a farmed one.
- Resting and yieldRest the bird 15 minutes under loose foil before carving. One 4-5 lb duck serves three, generously two; duck yields far less meat per pound than chicken.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was written to introduce Italian home cooking to an English-speaking American audience, and its terseness is characteristic: the book assumes a reader who can already roast, and offers only the detail that makes a dish Italian rather than not. The technique here, barding a lean-breasted bird with sheets of pork fat, is old and pan-European. The distinction the recipe draws between anatra domestica and the wild bird reflects a period when both were routinely available to a household: farmed ducks fattened for the table, and wild ones taken by hunters. The advice to use butter on wild duck and oil on the farmed one is a small piece of observation about fat content.