Last year’s Valentine’s Day was hard to top, what with the whole engagement thing. This year, although perhaps a bit less life-changing, at least involved some fascinating food. Well…so still life-changing; just in a different way.
For example, I now know the Tour d’Argent‘s recipe for the best vanilla ice cream in Paris.
On Wednesday night we went to the Cordon Bleu for a class on traditional Valentine’s Day chocolates, which, as it turns out, tend to need to cool and set for a good long time. During the interval, the instructor (who gave every indication of having enjoyed a good bottle of wine or two before the class) decided that he felt a bit disgruntled at not having gotten credit for the ice cream recipe, as he had been just a lowly sous-chef when he came up with it. As a result, he decided that it was time to share it with the thirty strangers in the audience, all of whom started frantically scribbling notes as if any of us is actually going to go out now and buy an ice cream machine and a hundred euros’ worth of vanilla beans.
One of these days, you know, one of us just might.
Anyway, on Thursday morning I felt inspired to try something…new, for dinner. Something tricky. I spent a couple of hours surrounded by cookbooks, but I soon discovered that I’m at a somewhat awkward point, cooking-wise. The really new and tricky things for me now either involve equipment that I don’t have or things that I’m not willing to do, like carving up an uncooked and bird-looking bird in the middle of my kitchen while the internal organs I’ve just scooped out of it simmer on the stove. Or whatever.
Anyway, I pretty much decided on a yummy-sounding (but basically boring) chicken recipe, but I registered some other ingredient combinations in case I changed my mind once I saw what the meat aisle had to offer.
When I saw…
…there was this duckling, you see. This perfect little tucked-together package of smooth skin with an almost fuschia tint from the deep red flesh underneath.
None of my half-memorized grocery lists applied to whole ducks, of course, since that would have been too easy, but I couldn’t make myself let go of the dense little football of duckling in my hand, and into the cart it went. Then I snapped out of it, and went careening through the aisles trying to put together any kind of recipe on my own. “Ducks go with orange, right? So I grab some oranges, and no matter what else happens I can use that. Maybe marjoram with the oranges, since the tomato half-chicken thing went on about it; it sounded right for sweet. But I bet I could stuff the duck, right? That would be more impressive, I–mangoes! Mangoes for a euro each! I can stuff it with…mangoes? Dear God that’s way too much for kumquats. You can’t just stuff fruit in, so maybe it’s a sauce–a salsa?–or maybe those leeks, or if not I can use them for soup, and…potatoes for the soup, and eggs just because I’ve never thought, ‘Wow, I really have way too many eggs!’ Wait, that’s what they call bay leaf?”
I’m a wimp, so I started the soup first. Potage parmentier is easy, and fills the entire kitchen with a highly rewarding smell almost immediately. It’s a good way to start; it takes your mind off the football in the fridge.
But of course, there was only so long that I could avoid it, and even the soothing leek smell couldn’t keep me calm when that time was up. For the last few hours, this annoying thought had been nagging at me: I like my carcasses neat. I was drawn to the duckling because it looked so…neat. No edges, no holes, no slimy, cartilage-y bits. No anything, in fact, except for an expanse of skin.
So what do you stuff?
I knew that there had to be a way in. I mean–the duck had a head at one point, right? Not to mention–well, no; let’s not mention. Let’s just say that it had to have had a head at some point. I tore off the plastic, and inspected the thing more closely. Now I could see a slit of some kind, like a fold. I pulled lightly at the bottom edge, and tried to control my gag reflex as it…moved.
It took me about twenty seconds to open up the neck cavity. For the first fifteen, all that I could think about was the distinct possibility that the neck was folding into the body so tightly because the body wasn’t empty. I braced myself to see a heart, a gizzard, a…whatever ducks have. I wondered if I would be able to just tilt those things into the trash, or if I would have to touch them–and if I did, then how much time I would lose trying to work up the nerve to do it.
It was only in the last five seconds that I thought to worry about just how much of the neck was tucked up into the cavity; and visions of birds with their heads still on in the market danced through my suddenly light head.
Naturally, none of my fears were realized; the only real challenge to my queasiness was scooping the extra fat out of the neck, which–well, there’s just no way that that can be fun.
Most recipes agree that it is a good idea to make slits in the skin wherever you think that there are pockets of fat just underneath. I tried this; I kept poking at the bird and trying to learn the tactile difference between fat and muscle on a cold dead thing that won’t help out by flexing for me. It all looked like just meat to me, which complicated my learning process a bit, but I began to see that the skin seemed just a bit thicker in some spots than others. I never found the pillowy clouds of fat I’d been looking for; instead it was just these wide, shallow pools that spread under the skin.
It made me wonder what it looks like just under my own skin.
Anyway.
Potage parmentier and roasted duckling with mango-orange stuffing; it was a lovely meal. The only thing that it needed, in retrospect, was some really good vanilla ice cream.
Maybe next year.