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June 5
Menu: Grapefruit Cocktail; Roast Duckling, Apple Sauce; Creamed Carrots; Rice Fritters; Macedoine Salad Wafers; Cheese Rhubarb Meringue Pie; Coffee Roast Duckling-This is prepared and trussed similarly to goose, but not usually stuffed. Roast from 30 to 40 minutes. Green peas are the usual accompaniment to roast duckling. Serve with apple sauce which is made as follows: 1 pound cooking apples, 1 tablespoon Crisco, 1½ cup water, and sugar. Peel, core, and slice the apples, cook them in a stewpan with water and Crisco, add a little sugar to taste. Stir well, or pass through a sieve.
A menu-book entry rather than a full recipe: the duck is assumed knowledge, the apple sauce spelled out. Two things need attention — the roasting time, which suits a bird far smaller than what you will buy, and the shortening in the sauce.
- The roasting time is the hingeThirty to forty minutes suits a small spring duckling of two or three pounds, not the bird sold today. A supermarket Pekin duck runs 5 to 6 lb and needs roughly 2 hours, with the thigh reaching 165F. Judge by temperature, not the clock.
- Rendering the fatModern ducks carry a thick subcutaneous fat layer. Score the breast skin in a diamond pattern, prick the flanks, and pour the rendered fat off the pan two or three times; the skin will not crisp sitting in it.
- Trussed like a goose, not stuffedAn unstuffed cavity cooks faster and more evenly. If you want aromatics, a halved onion, an apple quarter and a few thyme sprigs loose in the cavity are enough — nothing that needs to reach a safe temperature itself.
- The water quantity looks wrongA pound of apples stewed with a full 1½ cups of water gives a thin purée. Half a cup is nearer the mark for a spoonable sauce; the book's figure may be a typesetting error, so add water gradually and judge by eye.
- Crisco in apple sauceThe tablespoon of shortening is here because the book is advertising it. A tablespoon of butter does the same job — enriches the purée and stops it catching — and tastes better with apple. Modern Crisco is also reformulated: the original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil high in trans fat, today's is not.
- Apples"Cooking apples" in 1913 meant something firm and sharp that collapses when stewed — Bramley in Britain, Rhode Island Greening or similar in the States. Granny Smith or McIntosh will do; sweet eating apples need extra acid, so add a squeeze of lemon rather than more sugar.
- YieldA 5 lb duck will serve three or four. A pound of apples makes roughly a cup and a half of sauce, depending on how much water goes in, which is ample for that number.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier. The book's job was to show that the new fat could go anywhere butter or lard went — which is why a tablespoon of it turns up in an apple sauce that has no structural need of shortening at all. This page comes from a day-by-day calendar of dinner menus, and falls in early June: duckling and green peas were a common pairing in English and American cookery of the period, both being spring produce, and the bird was expected to be a young one. Apple sauce with duck, rather than the sage-and-onion stuffing given to goose, was the usual English pairing, and Neil keeps to it.