Domestic Duck

History

This recipe is documented only as it appears in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), where Abby Fisher gives a domestic (farm-raised) duck a plain treatment: a bread stuffing seasoned with salt, pepper, and butter or lard, then roasted or baked "in the same manner you do a turkey," and basted while cooking. In the book it sits directly beside her method for wild duck, which she directs should not be stuffed at all — so the stuffing here is specifically her handling of the domestic bird.

Abby Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton, and settled in San Francisco after emancipation, where she ran a pickle and preserves business. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Unable to read or write, she dictated the book's recipes to friends who set them down for her, drawing on what she described as "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years" in cooking, preserving, and pickling. Her preserves and sauces had already won two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 and a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879. The book is the second known cookbook by a Black woman published in the United States, after Malinda Russell's 1866 "Domestic Cook Book," and is among the oldest surviving cookbooks by an African American author.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this preparation. It survives as Fisher set it down: her own account of how old Southern kitchens roasted a stuffed domestic duck.

Ingredients

• 1 whole duck
• bread
• salt
• pepper
• butter or lard

Instructions

1. Prepare a bread stuffing as you would for turkey, seasoning it with salt, pepper, and butter or lard.
2. Stuff and truss the duck.
3. Roast or bake in the same manner as you would prepare a turkey.
4. Baste the duck regularly while cooking until it is well cooked.