Venetian stuffed duck

Prep time: 30 minutes, plus resting time Cook time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Serves 4

This recipe comes from Valentina Harris’s Regional Italian Cooking. I’ve been making it for years and only changed it slightly. Its savoury-sweet stuffing is unusual. You can adapt it to your own taste using more veal or chicken livers to replace the pancetta. The other duck stuffings I love are prune, sausage and rye bread (with crushed juniper berries), and fennel, potatoes and olives.

INGREDIENTS For the stuffing

– 250g minced veal – 125g pancetta, very

finely chopped

– 2 chicken livers, trimmed, washed and chopped

– 2 tbsp olive oil

– 5g parsley, finely

chopped

– leaves from 3 sprigs

thyme

– 85g fresh white

breadcrumbs

– 5 amaretti biscuits (the traditional small ones), crushed – 2 tbsp grated Parmesan – 1 egg yolk

– 5 tbsp Marsala

– some freshly grated

nutmeg

For the duck and sauce

– 2kg oven-ready duck – sea salt flakes, for

seasoning

– 15g butter

– 2 shallots, finely

chopped

– 1 small carrot, diced – ½ stick celery, diced – 100ml dry white wine – 500ml well-flavoured

chicken or duck stock

METHOD

Put everything for the stuffing into a large bowl and mix the ingredients, along with salt and pepper, with a fork or your hands.

Heat the oven to 200C/190C fan/gas mark 6. Remove any giblets from the duck and pull off the excess bits of fat around the opening to the cavity.

Dry the duck all over with kitchen paper and season it inside. Push the stuffing inside the duck and set the bird on a rack in a roasting tin. Pierce the skin all over with a skewer (without going as far as the meat), then season with sea salt flakes. Cook for 1 hour 30 minutes, then remove from the oven. Put the bird on to a warm plate and cover it with foil. Let it rest for 20 minutes.

Pour the liquid in the roasting tin into a jug. It will be mostly fat. Chuck a handful of ice cubes into the jug so that the fat floats to the top; remove the fat and keep it for future frying. Set aside any duck juices.

Melt the butter in a saucepan and sauté the shallot, carrot and celery until soft but not coloured. Add the wine, bring to the boil, and let the wine cook until it has reduced by 50 per cent. Pour in the stock and any duck juices, and bring to the boil again.

Let this reduce until you have a flavour you are happy with – it shouldn’t be too salty or too strong and it doesn’t have to be thick. Strain this into a smaller pan and discard the veg.

Carve the duck and serve with the stuffing, and the sauce to spoon over. The dish works well with roast chicory or radicchio, or buttery Savoy cabbage, alongside potatoes sautéed in duck fat.