Lockdown Edition Week 7: Cinnamon Duck with Redcurrant Sauce

The book: Good Housekeeping New Step-by-Step Cookbook

The recipe: p226, "Cinnamon Duck with Redcurrant Sauce"

I don't really do meat. By which I mean I don't really do slabs of meat, for want of a better term. Joints, lamb shanks, and especially steaks - these things are very much not my area of expertise. Partly because they demand a more delicate touch than I possess - "heavily overdone" and "heavily underdone" are just two of the outcomes of previous attempts - and partly because (to be honest) I don't enjoy cooking while worrying about fucking up something relatively expensive. As such, I tend to leave that kind of thing to the experts, i.e. actual restaurants (or my friend Kate in Berlin, whose credo is "you're not allowed to leave the table until your third round of meat sweats").

What this means is I've literally never cooked duck at home before, in any shape or form. Still, a recipe from the sturdy old Good Housekeeping cookbook feels like it should be quite a friendly way in to the topic. This is a book I bought aeons ago on the recommendation that it's a good "starter kit" for the kitchen n00b, and it's one I still recommend to others in that vein, even if it's probably showing its age a bit now. "Cinnamon Duck" also sounds like a reasonably interesting take on proceedings, even if it is clearly also an Eesti Laul band name.

The prep: The recipe is for six people, and while I do usually make the full quantity of these random recipes no matter what (our definition of "portion size" apparently differing wildly from that of pretty much every cookbook author), I'm drawing the line here. Not least because six duck breasts would cost about as much as I've spent on every other recipe so far.

As it turns out, "any duck breasts at all" would be a start. I do our weekly Asda shop fully expecting them to have nothing in stock that once quacked, but it turns out they do have whole ducklings in the chilled aisle, just not breast portions. Frustrating. I'm not ready to hack things up for the sake of randomness just yet, so instead I wait a few days then bite the bullet, making my first trip into central Lewisham since lockdown began.

I'm a little anxious about this - for obvious reasons, but also because I don't really want to have to queue for ages just for the sake of this foolish little blog. But the Sainsbury's experience proves to be surprisingly OK. I think my overactive imagination had it frozen in time on March 16th, the date of my last visit, and I'd forgotten that both shop and shoppers have had more than two months to get used to the way things are now. Either that or I just got lucky and it's usually merry chaos in there - it certainly often was before lockdown...

Anyway, I swiftly pick up a pack of two duck breasts, a wee punnet of watercress, the redcurrant jelly that Asda also failed to provide - and a bunch of seriously reduced Indian starter selections that go straight in the freezer for future snackage (score!).

Everything else is surprisingly storecupboardy - I even own marjoram, for some reason - so we're good to go!

The making: I score the duck (score!) before browning it in a frying pan, skin side down and without any oil, for five minutes. I drain the pan of oil at least twice during this process, so it's no surprise to see some shrinkage occurring even before the meat goes into the oven to be finished off.

Oh, I should add that the duck is not alone in the pan - as per the instructions (and the recipe name), I've added a cinnamon stick. After five minutes on a fairly high heat, the smell test suggests that this has done little to impart any flavour or colour; instead, I'm left with an incinerated cinnamon stick that needs to be put outside to calm down a bit.

Blackened is the end

My breasts are a little on the small side - 125g vs. the 175g required by the book - so I was already going to go by the instructions on the packet rather than what the recipe says. Which is probably for the best, since Good Housekeeping inexplicably wants the duck to go in the oven for half an hour. Half an hour! I know the book's a bit old-school and this country didn't really do pink meat back in the day, but there's having your meat well done and there's ensuring it's as dry as a bone. "12-15 minutes" is what the packaging suggests, so that's what I aim for instead.

Then it's time to prepare the sauce. This involves roughly chopping an onion and frying it with some oil and garlic until brown, then adding chicken stock, red wine, dried marjoram, Dijon mustard (oh christ not mustard again), a frankly tiny amount of ground cinnamon, a dollop of redcurrant jelly, and some salt and pepper.

This mixture is brought to the boil and left to bubble until reduced by half, then - aha! - I'm required to strain it. This takes me by surprise a little, purely because I hadn't bothered to read the recipe properly beforehand and was expecting the onion to mean a chunkier sauce was on the cards here. I now realise this "sauce" is in fact what a trendier recipe book would call a "jus", which is restaurant-speak for "we can charge £5 more for this".

Straining done, the sauce is returned to the pan to be slowly reheated. In the meantime, the meat has been removed from the oven and left to rest on the side "for 5-10 minutes". When I go to cut it, I can already see this has done for any residual pinkness - this is some well-done meat, albeit still juicy (mainly because I used my instinct and ignored the official guidance - I hear it's all the rage). It's also not an especially large quantity of meat: even with clever diagonal cutting, it would look relatively measly, and I need to get this served up so I don't have the patience for that.

In the absence of a serving suggestion beyond "on a plate", I've decided on mashed potato and green beans to accompany. Arranging the duck slices on a bed of mash is no problem, but I encounter something of an aesthetic obstacle when it comes to spooning over the sauce. You see, it's very... I mean to say, colour-wise it's... well, it just looks like red wine, to be honest. And that tends to pair about as well as you'd expect with the crevasses and contours of mashed white potato.

See? That is not a particularly elegant look, I'm afraid. The mash part is down to my own choices, so I won't blame the recipe for that, but the sauce also adds a rather unappealing purply-pink tinge to the duck itself, and that's an inherent design flaw.

Anyway, as you can see, I finish off the dish with a sprinkling of watercress - the Pointless answer of the edible plant world - and it's time for the taste buds to give their verdict.

The eating: While it may not be plentiful (and it could have been, I just chose to be a bit of a skinflint), the duck is perfectly good. I'd make sure it was done at least medium if not medium-rare next time, but I haven't fucked it up or anything (score!).

Going on looks alone, I'm ready for the sauce to taste of nothing but wine - we've been there before, Nigella - but it's actually really nice, with a deep flavour and a redcurrant tang that pairs very nicely with the meat.

What it doesn't taste of, at all, is the titular cinnamon. Weirdly enough, the stick that was in the loose vicinity of the meat during the browning phase and the eighth of a teaspoon (!) of the ground stuff that went into the sauce have barely made any impact at all against the stronger flavours like the red wine and the mustard. I'm not necessarily sad about this, because it's a nice dish as it stands and a proper cinnamon kick might have felt a bit out of place, but it'd be good to at least feel its presence somewhere in there.

"Serve the remaining sauce separately", the recipe says. Yeah, probably for the best or the plate would be swimming in the stuff. Anyway, having taken a few pictures while things are still relatively photogenic, we do indeed pour on a good bit more of the jus and revel in the cognitive dissonance of well-done meat with the look of a bloody steak. Weird, but tasty.

Aesthetics and perplexing lack of cinnamon aside, anyway, I think this week's Random Kitchen can be summed up in the same way as my music collection: old-fashioned but pretty decent.

Two-word verdict: Misdesignated goodness.