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To Roast Wild Duck
After wild ducks have been prepared for roasting, rub them inside with salt and pepper, put in each duck a small piece of butter, fill them with bread moistened with melted butter and with a little very finely chopped onion and well seasoned with pepper, and salt. A wild duck that has a fishy flavor will be improved by parboiling, before roasting, in water with a medium sized onion.
The original assumes a cook who already knows how her ducks behave in the oven; it names neither a temperature nor a time. Wild duck is the leanest bird most kitchens will ever handle, and that single fact governs everything here.
- The hinge: heat fast, pull earlyWild duck has almost none of the fat that protects a farmed Pekin, and it turns liver-dry and grey well before it looks done. A hot oven, around 450F, and a short stay is the usual modern approach; breast meat is generally judged at its best around 130-135F on an instant-read thermometer, which for a mallard means roughly 15-20 minutes, less for teal.
- Stuffing and the temperature conflictBread stuffing packed inside a bird needs to reach 165F to be safe, and by the time the centre of the cavity gets there the breast is ruined. Cook the moistened, buttered, onion-seasoned bread in a dish alongside and put a halved onion or an apple in the cavity instead, purely for aroma.
- What "prepared for roasting" coversIn period usage this meant plucked, singed over a flame to remove pinfeathers and down, and drawn; instructions for waterfowl often add removing the oil gland at the base of the tail. Wild ducks also carry shot: run your fingers over the breast before cooking and dig out any pellets you find.
- The fishy flavour, and the parboilThe off taste comes from diet, not from spoilage. Fish- and shellfish-eating ducks such as mergansers, scoters and old squaws taste strongly of it, while dabblers like mallard, teal and widgeon rarely do. Parboiling with an onion does dilute the flavour, but it also washes out what makes wild duck worth roasting, so reserve the trick for the divers.
- "A small piece of butter"Read this as about a tablespoon per bird. Because the skin renders so little fat of its own, it is worth laying a strip of bacon or salt pork over each breast as well.
- RestingGive the birds 10 minutes off the heat before carving. The muscle is dense and dark, and it needs the pause more than a chicken does.
- YieldOne mallard-sized duck serves two modestly, one generously; teal and other small ducks are a single portion each.
- LegalityWild ducks are migratory game birds and cannot be bought or taken outside a licensed season in most countries. Farmed duck, wild-flavoured varieties included, is the practical substitute, and being fatter it wants a lower oven and a longer roast.
Game occupies its own section in American household books of this period because game was, at least for many households, still a fairly ordinary part of the table: market hunting supplied city butchers with wild ducks by the barrel until the Lacey Act of 1900 barred interstate transport of illegally taken game and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its regulations brought the commercial trade to an end. That commercial supply is why a general-purpose cook book could assume its readers had wild duck to deal with, and why it bothers to address the fishy-tasting bird -- a market buyer had no idea what species she was getting or what it had been eating. The bread, butter and onion filling is the standard nineteenth-century dressing for any roast bird, and the parboiling-with-an-onion remedy appears in enough contemporary books to count as received household wisdom rather than one author's invention.