Step by step

Stuff the duck with the onion and the salt-preserved citrus fruit

Tips
If you want to prepare your duck à l'orange for Christmas lunch, but don’t want to spend a huge amount, you should buy your duck a week or two in advance, and freeze it. The resulting dish will be equally good, and you will have saved some money: it is well known that in the days leading up to Christmas, ducks, turkeys and guinea fowl are more expensive.
Trivia
The first people to farm and eat ducks seem to have been the Chinese. It appears they may have "invented" this recipe, which then made its way to Italy. It could thus be described as an "ethnic" recipe, whose diffusion around Italy started from Medicean Florence. In the court of Catherine of the Medici, duck à l'orange was cooked and eaten under the name of "papero alla melarancia". From Florence it first spread throughout Italy and then to France, thanks to Henry II of Valois, husband of De Medici.