Pâté Chaud de Caneton

Pâté Chaud de Caneton (hot raised duckling pie) teaches one true thing before you touch a pan: roast the duck breast short, because the hour inside the pastry is its second roasting. Take the first roast too far and no sauce can return its tenderness. Pull it rosy, slice it into long collops, and let the oven finish what you began.

The original kitchen assumed a saucier on staff, a stockpot never off the fire, a large Charlotte mould, and a salamander within reach, though this pie earns its colour in an ordinary oven. At home, the honest equivalents are prepared reduced demi-glace and Madeira sauce, a 1½-quart straight-sided mould, and finished forcemeat waiting cold. The book's brigade quantity of 1⅔ pounds of forcemeat becomes 450 grams for four, while its four tablespoons of half-glaze become 35 millilitres. The ratio has not moved. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Separate hands building sauces while another cook roasted the bird were brigade scaffolding, and that can go. What stays is the dish: short paste fitted without holes, alternating layers of forcemeat, duck, cooked mushrooms, and truffle, then the inversion, the pastry triangles, and the generous spooning of Madeira sauce. Keep the filling cool enough not to soften the pastry, but continue directly to the final bake. The step that decides everything remains the first one: roast the breast underdone.