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Ragout of Duck
(Ireland.) Clean and cut up a fine young duck, fry it in butter or drippings, with an onion, and 2 ounces chopped ham, add 1 ounce flour, stir, and add 1/2 pint of hot water and a tablespoonful of vinegar, some parsley, a little thyme, and a piece of celery. Cover, and cook 1 hour, season, and serve with a border of potato croquettes, or mashed potatoes, browned.
SCOTCH STEW (from a private recipe book.) The border tribes and lairds have been forced, for several centuries, to economize closely, and when they can get a piece of fresh meat, they utilize every scrap most carefully. Poverty has taught them many secrets besides caution and self-control.
Peel and chop 6 small onions, add a pint of cold water, and cook for 1 hour. Strain the water, thicken it with flour and an ounce of butter, add a cupful of gravy, left over from the meat used, and skimmed, a tablespoonful of Worcestershire and another of tomato sauce, some parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Mix and pour over the cold roast mutton, or turkey, or veal cut into pieces, with 6 boiled and peeled potatoes, and cook for 20 minutes, covered with a thick layer of bread-crumbs.
Two recipes share this page: an Irish duck braise and a made-over dish of cold roast meat. Both are built on the assumption that you have drippings, leftover gravy and a hot oven already going.
- The hinge: brown hard, braise gentlyHalf a pint of water for a whole cut-up duck is a braise, not a stew, so the pan must be tightly covered and kept at a bare simmer or it will dry out. Colour the pieces deeply first; that fond is the only body the sauce gets besides the flour.
- Skip the added fatA modern Pekin duck carries far more fat than the lean birds this book assumed. Start the pieces skin-side down in a dry pan, render off most of the fat, and use a spoonful of it in place of the butter or drippings.
- MeasuresAn ounce of flour is about 1/4 cup; 2 ounces of chopped ham is a thick slice, roughly 1/3 cup diced. Half a pint of hot water is 1 cup. "A piece of celery" means a rib, pulled out before serving along with the thyme stems.
- An hour is right for legs, long for breastDuck legs want the full hour or more. If you want the breast pink, brown it with the rest, lift it out after ten minutes, and return it to warm through at the end.
- "A fine young duck"A duckling of about 4-5 lb, jointed into two legs, two wings and two breast halves. Ducks sold whole today are often around this size, though many run larger; a bigger bird will need closer to 90 minutes.
- Yield and the potato borderServes three, four at a stretch. The croquette or mashed-potato border was piped or spooned round the edge of the platter and browned; a period kitchen would likely have used a salamander, and a hot broiler does the same job in a few minutes.
- For the Scotch stewIt is a reheat dish, and the skimmed leftover gravy carries much of the flavour, alongside the Worcestershire, tomato sauce, parsley and nutmeg. The recipe names no oven or temperature, but to set and colour the crumb layer a moderate oven -- about 375F -- for the stated 20 minutes works; on the stovetop the crumbs will not set or colour.
- Onion waterAn hour of boiling six onions in a pint of water reduces the liquid noticeably and gives a sweet, thin onion stock. Top it back up to a pint before thickening, or the sauce will be pasty once the flour and butter go in.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre in which American cooks were introduced to "foreign" dishes country by country, each recipe tagged with its supposed nationality. Ragout comes from the French ragoûter, to revive the appetite, and by 1900 the word meant any braise of cut-up meat in a flour-thickened sauce; the ham, vinegar and bundle of parsley, thyme and celery here are straight out of the French repertoire, dressed as Irish. The Scotch stew that follows is the more revealing of the pair: a made-over dish, the Victorian household's answer to the Sunday joint, in which cold roast mutton, turkey or veal is brought back with onion stock, yesterday's skimmed gravy and two bottled sauces. Worcestershire and bottled tomato sauce were by then widely available and generally inexpensive commercial goods, and their appearance in a "private recipe book" of border thrift says more about late-nineteenth-century grocery shelves than about the lairds the headnote invokes.