Caneton Rouennais

Caneton Rouennais (Rouen-style roast duckling) teaches restraint with heat. The duck must remain rosy, and the liver inside it must be merely stiffened before it is pounded and sieved. The one true thing is this: cook either one too far and you lose the tenderness that defines the dish.

The original entry needs none of the canon's usual saucier, stockpot, or salamander. It assumes instead a young Rouen bird, a mortar, a fine tamis, and brigade hands free to pound eight ounces of liver into silk. At home, one duckling feeds four, a small food processor replaces the pounding, and a sturdy fine-mesh sieve does the work of the tamis. I have changed the labor and the portion, not the sequence or its proportions: four ounces of larding bacon, one ounce of onion, and eight ounces of duck liver remain intact. The mortar work was brigade scaffolding and can go. Barely stiffening the liver, sieving it fine, and roasting the bird without drying it are the dish itself, and they stay.

Done properly, the skin comes out deeply burnished, the breast remains rosy beneath it, and the forcemeat is smooth, rich, and faintly spiced rather than coarse or crumbly. Watch the liver first. The instant its surface firms while the center remains pink, take the pan from the heat; that is the step that decides everything afterward.