Boned Stuffed Duck Baked in a Pastry Crust

The main course of our Christmas 2010 dinner was Pâté de Canard en Croûte, which is a boned (that is, de-boned) duck wrapped around a highly seasoned ground meat stuffing, the whole thing encased in a pastry crust. This is the recipe that is played up as a Monumental Undertaking in the movie Julie & Julia: “Can you even conceive of boning a duck?” My personal conclusion, having made the thing, is that it is far more time consuming than expected, but not difficult. It would simply be hard to make it taste bad. I also took away from this experience that Pâté de Canard en Croûte is a make ahead recipe -- almost all of the individual components can and should be prepared in advance.

Going back in time a little bit, the boning of our Christmas duck was not my first time boning poultry. A few weeks before Christmas, I boned a two-pound chicken that was destined for the soup pot. I boned it just to see if I could do it, removing every last bone, including the drumsticks and wings. I named the chicken “Opti Gal,” after a name-brand of Swiss chickens.

Opti Gal’s surgery was successful (or unsuccessful from her point of view) thanks to my prior “research” on YouTube. If you would like to try boning a bird yourself, I recommend viewing several how-to videos on YouTube first. Watching multiple videos is a good idea, because it allows you to see the whole process from start to finish from different camera angles.

Returning to the recipe for Pâté de Canard en Croûte, after de-boning the duck, you cut out some of the meat from the thickest parts of the thighs and breasts. This meat is chopped up and laid back in the bird, the interior of which is splashed with port and cognac, and then placed in a bowl to marinate while the cook prepares the forcemeat stuffing.

To make the forcemeat, I ground veal and pork together through the meat grinder attachment of my mixer. Despite an attempt to communicate with the Swiss grocery store butcher on Christmas Eve, I could not locate fresh pork fat to grind with the meats. Instead, I removed two fresh, mild veal sausages from their casing and ran that meat through the grinder as well. The seasonings for the forcemeat mixture included allspice and more port.

At this point, it was getting LATE, my mom and husband were hungry for Christmas dinner, and I still needed to stuff the duck with the forcemeat, sew up the incision from which I had removed the bones and tie the duck into a log shape, brown the re-formed duck on the stovetop, make pastry to encase the browned duck, brush the pastry with egg wash, and bake the whole thing for two hours.

I rushed through the pastry, resulting in what was undoubtedly the worst pastry of my life. Foregoing the pastry cut-outs that garnish the duck in the cookbook, I stuck a venting cone made out of aluminum foil through the top of the pastry crust, down into the meat, and put the whole thing into the oven. About a quarter of my hasty pastry (ha!) collapsed during the baking. John helped me push it back up along the side of the bird and secure it with a toothpick.

When I pulled the duck out of the oven, it was almost 10 pm. Not one of us had eaten a decent thing on Christmas yet--well except John and my mom, who finished leftover braised brisket and onion gravy from the fridge. We carefully removed the top of the pastry crust so that we could snip and pull out the trussing string. At this point we were so hungry, we could not be bothered with carving elegant slices and arranging pretty plates. The pastry did not bake up attractively, but it did not taste half bad. The meat was delicious; the flavors melded so nicely that it was hard to distinguish the duck from the filling.

The funny thing is that the recipe intends for the finished duck to be served cold, not hot as we ate it. I did taste some of the leftovers (this dish should feed twelve people, not three) cold from the fridge. While the meat was good cold, I am not one for cold pie crust.

As mentioned above, almost all the components of Pâté de Canard en Croûte can be finished a day ahead of time and held in the fridge. Specifically, the duck can be boned, the meat stuffing ground and mixed, and the pastry made ahead of time, even rolled out and placed back in the fridge, neatly folded. Hopefully someone else will learn from my mistake in this respect, and "Do as I say, not as I did"!!