Duck Lima-Style (Pato a la Limena)

History

This is a whole duck boned without breaking its shape, packed with a forcemeat, sewn shut and roasted — a showpiece bird rather than an everyday stew. The stuffing is built from the duck's own giblets and a piece of boiled beef cooked in puchero broth, chopped and bound with foamed butter, four eggs, breadcrumbs and milk, then studded with almonds, Málaga raisins and olives. It is finished with a choice of two sauces: one of sieved roasted-tomato juice with parsley and ground maní (peanut), the other a paler cream of parsley, toasted breadcrumbs, cream or milk and four ground cooked egg yolks, both sharpened with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. The bird is set out whole, the sauce poured over, and only then are the stitches cut so the stuffing spills open at the table.

Almost every element of the method — boning and stuffing a fowl, the egg-and-breadcrumb forcemeat, the almonds, Málaga raisins and olives, the wheat bread, the butter and milk — belongs to the Spanish/European side of this kitchen, brought to Peru with the colonial larder. What makes it Peruvian is the base and the accents: duck itself is native to the Americas, its range reaching well into South America, and it was domesticated by Indigenous peoples in pre-Columbian times, with ancient Peruvians 'very fond of native ducks' and given to cooking them many ways; the ground peanut and the roasted tomato in the first sauce are likewise New-World foods folded into a Spanish frame. The result is a criollo dish in the exact sense the rest of this book documents — Andean-American ingredients dressed in Iberian technique.

The better-known Peruvian duck lineage runs elsewhere. The celebrated arroz con pato — duck cooked into cilantro-green rice — is a northern-coast specialty, 'one of the most famous dishes in Chiclayo, north of Lima,' made once rice, onions and cilantro had arrived to join the native bird; it is a separate dish from this stuffed roast, and the record does not tie the two together. Just how established a named 'pato á la limeña' was in 1890 the sources do not settle: the label here is the contributor's, marking her city rather than a dish attested outside this page, and the recipe itself is undated within the 1890 book. Contributed from Lima by Josefina Bustamante de La Puente, it is best read as one Lima household's festive duck — the family's own version, offered under the city's name — rather than the canonical Peruvian duck dish, which lies to the north.

Ingredients

• 1 duck
• giblets (liver, gizzard, heart)
• broth from the puchero (boiled-meat stew)
• cooked meat
• butter
• 4 eggs
• breadcrumbs
• milk
• salt
• pepper
• almonds
• Malaga raisins
• olives
• roasted tomato juice
• ground parsley
• peanuts (mani), ground
• oil
• vinegar
• cream or good milk (natas)
• 4 cooked egg yolks

Instructions

1. Carefully bone the duck without deforming it. Cook the giblets (liver, gizzard, heart) in puchero broth and chop them finely with a piece of cooked meat.
2. Melt and warm butter, beat to a foam, and mix in four eggs, breadcrumbs, milk, salt, pepper, almonds, and Malaga raisins.
3. Combine this with the chopped meat, add olives, and stuff the duck, sewing it closed so the stuffing does not spill; bake in the oven.
4. For the sauce, choose either sieved roasted-tomato juice with ground parsley and peanuts, seasoned with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper; or parsley, toasted breadcrumbs, cream or milk, and four ground cooked egg yolks with the same seasoning.
5. Set the duck in the serving dish, pour the sauce over it, and undo the stitching.