Because Savage Kitten has never mentioned our relationship to her family (as her siblings have likewise kept their private lives utterly private), she ends up at the old mother’s house every holiday with her kin, wondering what craziness will happen this year at the dinner table (which I will hear about in detail when she returns – it’s good to live a Cantonese-American life vicariously). (*)
What this means is that she and I celebrate Thanksgiving a day later than everyone else. Or, for one day longer – it is, after all, outside the land.
And because we are secretive, and not hospitable (small apartment, filled to the rafters with books, a veritable fire hazard of a place – please move gracefully, like a cat, not kajumpily, like a heffalump), we need only enough food to feast the two of us, not a bird the size of an ox.
Besides, she will have already eaten turkey the evening before, and I rather dislike them.
Something smaller and better, then.
For that, a duck is perfect. Which I’ve been doing now for nearly a decade (before that, she would do a chicken or a fish, and I would do the vegetables, salad, and a sweet for after).
I really like duck, though. Especially if brined and roasted at a high temperature.
The advantage of cooking a brined bird at high heat for a relatively short period of time is that it turns out crisp skinned, juicy, and tender.
[Note added December 30, 2013: the traditional method is described in this post: CANTONESE ROAST GOOSE. The bird is treated with soy sauce and sugar or honey, then dried a bit before roasting. In Hong Kong, they would use Maltose, which is hard to find here. It's just a local preference, and sugar or honey work just as well. The recipe below combines the soy and sweetness approach with a brine treatment. Brining a bird for a day or two makes it wonderfully tender and juicy. Read both recipes, and decide which one will suit you best.]
Here, then, is the recipe.
SIU NGAAP (Roast Duck).
For a five to six pound duck:
Four and half cups sherry.
Three cups soy-sauce.
Six Tablespoons cane-sugar.
Six Tablespoons fresh lime juice.
A large thumblength fresh ginger, smashed with the flat of a cleaver.
Six to eight whole star-anise.
Four or five bayleaves.
One Teaspoon whole peppercorns.
Quarter Teaspoon cinnamon powder.
The duck must be freshly bought, or entirely thawed. Go over it with a tweezer to pull out the more obvious feather remainders, and rinse out the cavity with cold water.
Whisk the ingredients listed above together until the sugar has dissolved. Place the duck in a roomy plastic bag, and pour in the sherry and soy-sauce mixture. Tighten the bag so that the duck is entirely covered by the marinade, and tie the top to prevent leakage. Place the package in an oval basin in the refrigerator to soak for at least twenty-four hours, tied end up (the duck can lie down, but the basin and the tied end up are so that the chance of a leak is lessened).
On the day that you will roast the duck, remove it from the refrigerator and drain the marinade into a saucepan. Bring the liquid to a boil and pour it over the duck (placed in a roomy pot for this purpose), in order to tighten the skin. Reheat the marinade, and repeat the pouring. Do this one time more. Pat the duck dry, place on a rack, and let air dry for an hour.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Prepare rack and roasting pan, with a layer of water in the roasting pan so the drippings do not smoke or burn. Roast the duck for one and a quarter hours, turning twice for an even colour. Start breast up, and finish breast up. Check on the beast occasionally to make sure he isn’t turning too dark (and if you fear this happening, place a tin-foil tent over him to prevent him colouring further).
Let the bird rest for half an hour on the kitchen counter before carving. When carving, use a pair of clean kitchen shears instead of hacking at it with a chefs knife – who says you have to make a dinner-table performance of it?
You could also hack it into chunks with a Chinese cleaver, like the fat guy at the take-out counter of the Sin Kam Po does.
Save the dripped grease in the roasting pan to clarify later, as duck-fat is gorgeous with potatoes. There should be between one and four cups after clarifying; the amount of grease largely depends on how fatty the duck is, and how much of that lovely fat oozed out while roasting.
The remaining marinade is not worth keeping, though a little bit can be boiled up into a salty jus, or incorporated into a whiskey sauce.
WHISKEY SAUCE
One and a half cups good stock.
Half a cup whiskey (Bourbon or Irish).
Quarter cup reserved marinade, or two Tbs soy sauce.
Some chopped garlic, parsley, and chives.
Pinches of pepper, sugar, and dry ginger.
One or two cloves and bay leaves.
About four Tablespoons of the grease from the roasting pan.
A few sliced mushrooms optional.
Sweat the garlic and herbs (and optional mushrooms) in the duck-grease till softened. Before they brown or turn colour, add everything else. Raise heat to boiling, turn low and simmer till the alcohol has cooked off and the sauce has reduced by about forty percent. Taste, and adjust seasoning if necessary.
CHUTNEY
A simple chutney goes well with duck, as a dab on the side of your plate. Here's a recipe for a quick fruit chutney.
Half a cup chunky peach or plum jam.
Quarter cup each: Orange juice, sherry.
A little minced ginger, a hefty squeeze of lime juice, and a heavy dash of vinegar (balsamic, if you have it, otherwise red wine vinegar will do).
One Tablespoon Louisiana hot-sauce.
Half a Teaspoon chili pepper flakes.
Quarter Teaspoon cayenne.
Pinches of salt, dry ginger, cinnamon powder.
Combine, simmer till reduced by half, stir to prevent scorching.
You can prepare this a day or more in advance, as it improves from a little refrigerator aging. The flavours develope overnight.
Note I: In stead of actual ginger and sugar in the duck-marinade, up to half a cup of ginger syrup can be used. In which case, add about a teaspoon of salt to the marinade.
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Note II: If you prefer not to use sherry and soy-sauce, you can make a simple brine. The proportion of liquid to salt to sugar would 20 parts water to one part salt, one part sugar. If you intend to soak longer, add a jigger vinegar and some extra salt. But twenty four hours is just about right.
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Note III: Oven roasted potato wedges are traditional with duck. And easy. Just rub some wedges lightly with duck-grease or olive oil, and put them on a tray in the oven at the same temperature as the duck for about half an hour, taking them out occassionaly to agitate for even colouring.
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Note IV: You could also replace up to half a cup of the soy-sauce with ketjap manis, which is a very sweet and dark soy-sauce made in Holland and Indonesia. Or serve a little on the side - it goes very well with roasts and grilled meats. With a squeeze of lime and some fresh chilies.
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(*) Note regarding the secrecy of the relationship. Savage Kitten is of Cantonese ancestry, I am not. And her mother is very old-fashioned, old-country, old-school (and yes, I have actually met her a few times on the street in C-town, and I know that type very well, so I do know what I'm talking about).
Now, imagine this monologue, in a rural Cantonese dialect:
“You married a WHAT??!?!! How can you do this to us, after all we’ve done for you!?!?!?!? Bitch!!!! You should’ve married a dentist from our hometown!!!!! Not a kwailoh!!!!! AND they smell bad!!!! Szei lo-faan!!!!! Disobedient girl!!!!!! Why did we even teach you to read???!?!?!!! Chee-loui!!!! You should NEVER have gone to school!!!! Fan-ah ney, szei kwai-chu!!! Oh, if only your grandfather were alive today!!!!! What will we tell the relatives!!!!!! Cursed dead daughter, we should’ve sent you to live on the farm!!!!!! Oooh, I'm having an attack, aaah!!!!! Your own people aren’t good enough for you??!!?!! We never should’ve come to this country!!! We should’ve married you off when we had the chance!!!! Sold you!!! For cheap!!!! Should’ve drowned you!!!! Traded you for a pig!!!!!! No one will respect us now!!!! Now we will NEVER find spouses for your syblings!!!!! Aeeeyahhh!!!!!! The shame, the shame, the horror, the horror, aaaaaaaauuurrgh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Now try to imagine these themes being repeated until the old lady grows weary. Which might take a very long time, as elderly Cantonese mothers are full of piss and vinegar. With more histrionics than you can possibly imagine.
Doesn’t it seem so much simpler to just not say a darn thing and quietly elope?
Of course, we had to leave the piano behind when she moved out of C-town. Wouldn’t fit in the station wagon.
Have a happy thanksgiving, y'all.
24 comments:
Sounds like a good recipe.
Scary Cantonese mothers... you wouldn't happen to know my friend Hanuman Zhang, would you?
Sounds like Uncle Bonzo from Madama Butterfly.
Cio-Cio-San!
Che hai tu fatto alla Missione?
Come, hai tu gli occhi asciutti?
Son dunque questi i frutti?
(urlando)
Ci ha rinnegato tutti!
Rinnegato, vi dico,...
il culto antico
Kami sarundasico!
All'anima tua
guasta qual
supplizio sovrasta!
What an absolutely splendid curse-phrase:
"All'anima tua guasta qual supplizio sovrasta! "
[May your wicked soul be tormented
with eternal damnation!]
I'll have to memorize it - despite there probably never being an opportunity to use it.
And thanks for the link to the script. I love texts with side by side translations.
Do you like Madama Butterfly. (I don't particularly like it, though I am told that my mother's mother's mother, of blessed memory, liked it a lot. The opera was first performed in 1904, at which time my great-grandmother would have been about eight years old.)
Oh, and yes-- it is a great curse phrase!
Saw Madama Butterfly about fifteen plus years ago - and liked it then.
For me the great advantage of Opera is that, having done the reading before I go, it does not really matter that due to a hearing defect I can't understand the words.
[With movies, the constant background noise that theaters do so well makes it impossible to understand a thing, unless subtitled - hence a fondness for ANYTHING subtitled.]
With operas in German I especially like to have the entire script - even Der Ja Sager just sounds better if I can follow along (and I still vaguelly remember large parts of it). Drei Groschen, and Mahagony, had those memorized entirely for a long time. Bored classmates with Der Zigeuner Baron during my high-school years.
Madama Butterfly is an opera that, for some reason, irritates the spit out of Savage Kitten.
Besides, she will have already eaten turkey the evening before, and I rather dislike them.
You dislike them morally, or gastronomically? After all, as Lipman has said, if you hate them morally, that would davke be a reason to eat them.
Gastronomically. It is an insipid bird, even done well.
Morally, well, hard to say. Many authorities are meikel the issue, can't think, off the top of my head, of any who aren't. But that isn't really the question.
In the same way that I distrust big-agriculture when it comes to beef (some nice vaca loco, anyone?), I find the turkey industry to be something that bears the light of day badly.
The Turkey is the American equivalent of the esrog - hardly a market during most of the year, then an insane demand for a brief period. Not really an example of sustainable farming, and not enough from which to develop much of a culinary corpus.
No, didn't you understand Lipman's argument about detesting an animal morally? If you detest the moral qualities of the animal itself, that would be a good reason to kill it and eat it. (Or, at least, that's Lipman's logic.)
My own practice is to buy only organic or natural chicken or beef. Occasionally, I have a ta'avo for turkey, and I buy a piece of non-organic turkey. (I feel guilty about this, but I don't think it's possible to obtain organic, kosher turkey pieces. Nur a gantze Trothan. (Well, that's how you say Turkey in German. Don't know about Jiddisch turkey.)
Tomorrow, I'm going home to my mother. In her house, I will eat non-organic kosher meat (though I would never eat veal).
I understood the argument, but, while I liked it, I had to reject it.
Some people detest pigs (why, I don't know. remarkably intelligent and friendly animals).
Dogs are sexual deviants - voraciously so.
Horses are, perhaps, more stupid and untrustworthy than chickens - yet people love them (differently).
And well, lapin doesn't have morals either, and if I went by the example of Bambi, I would slaughter the entire deer population of Northern California ;-)
[I detest Bambi - and almost anything else Disney ever did. Saccharine sentiments are a moral failing.]
My teiva for Turkey is easily satisfied; once every three or four years.
As far as chicken is concerned, she has come to the conclusion that kosher chicken actually tastes better. And you will seldom find a Chinese person who doesn't put the taste of food ahead of every other consideration.......
Not that they're voracious, but food truly makes the Chinese happy. A Chinese person with existential angst probably hasn't eaten yet.
Veal. Liked it. Until I found out what they do to it. Kinda makes 'seething in its mother's milk' look like a minor lapse in comparison. Morally indefensible.
Fortunately, my mother never makes veal. (She would probably eat it at other people's homes, but that doesn't concern me.) Of course, I would never ch"v touch the stuff.
As you said: Moralllllly indefensible.
Which begs the question how one can be assured that one's hosts understand certain food-related ideas.
Explaining kashrus to Chinese people is hard, explaining to the owner of a local Indian restaurant that the only way to kasher his kitchen would be to burn the building down was much more so.
[He had, in a lovely pamphlet, advertised that they could provide both halal and kosher banquets - yet every surface and every implement in that kitchen had been used for both dairy and meats, and neither a shochet nor a rabbi trained in kashrus was even on retainer....]
For caste-Hindus, the higher castes can cook for the lower castes, but the lower castes cannot even touch the food of the higher castes.
Question of ritual cleanliness versus pollution. Many meats are considered polluting to some castes.
If Judaism were analogous, that would mean that a restaurant chef would have to be a well-trained, ultra-observant Levite or kohen.
Someone, in any case, whose adherence to kashrus, and whose Jewishness, could not be doubted, and could be vouched for.
Fascinating! So, due to reasons of tum'oh and tohoroh, lower casts (who you would think would be servants/cooks) may not cook for higher castes (who you would think would be overlords).
The caste system, or at least the purity aspect of it, thus actually encourages Marxist morality (or whatever you want to call it)!!
Exactly!
There are in fact subcastes of the higher castes who hereditarily cook, such as numerous families who have for generations been wedding caterers for specific other castes.
One of the reasons that Sikhism insists one eating together is to reject any and all caste-pretensions. All are equal in Sikhism (although like with any ideal, some pay lip service).
Sikhs are also phenominal meat-eaters... though at the communal meal in the guru's langar, they will serve (usually) no meat, so that non-meat eating Hindus can sit down too.
All are equal in Sikhism (although like with any ideal, some pay lip service).
And because all are equal, new, unofficial "castes" can form, and the higher "castes" can insist that the the lower ones cook for them. Unlike in Hinduism.
(Or am I sounding like a Republican, chos ve-scholem?)
Actually, the most visible sign of caste formation among Sikhs is taxidrivers versus restaurant workers (most Hindus subconsciously take Sikhs as Ksatria - martial caste, ergo 'acceptable').
In any case, Punjabis have a reputation for being good cooks and restaurateurs - many well to do Indians are accustomed to eating at Punjabi Tandoori restaurants.
What Punjabis apparently refuse to do is run hotels - that is something only a Patel would do, thank you very much.
Slight digression: Patels are nearly the same subcaste as Shahs (not 'king', but from Indic and Persian Syah, meaning black, meaning actually blue, in reference to Krishna). The muslim equivalent for Patel or Shah is Sheikh, if they're from Gujurat or Maharashtra.
Yo, At the back of the hill,
Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving today (and tomorrow :-).
What sweet will you (did you) have for after?
Yo, ddb,
No sweet. After dinner too busy rendering the carcas into soup-stock (now sitting in the ice-box, with a nice layer of congealed fat ready for clarifying on top).
Verkleumd? It's already that cold there? Why no djindjabirie?
Actually, Tayere Habib, Patel is not so much a surname as a caste nomen. I haven't met any Patels who weren't Patels, but not all Patels are named Patel.
Patels are almost by definition Gujeratis, claiming Brahmin status, descended from a group that moved south from the Punjab several centuries ago, with a history in landlordism, bookkeeping, and the jewelry trade.
In any case, the only reason to take on the name is for the 'in' it gives one with other Patels - who will ask all manner of questions to find out degree of relationship and connection - a fake would have little use of the name. Besides, if the caste-association directory doesn't show your name or that of your parents, you might as well forget it.
Patil, by the way, is not Gujerati, but South Indian - they often change their names to something else to avoid being mistaken for Patels.
Most other Indian would rather not be confused with Patels, because the highest esteem a Patels is held in, is in the holding of other Patels.
Any name with Singh in it, on the other hand.......
If not a Sikh, then someone claiming Kshatria (martial caste) status. Even though their actual caste might be questionable or doubtful. And if they're a Sikh, then by definition they're more martial than even a Rajput, and will drive over you with their taxi if you dare doubt it.
Back of the hill is an absolute heretic and nobody should read his writings.
Anybody that reads this will be reading apikorsish garbage.
This is BITTUL TORAH.
How do you cook bittel torah?
Not so much a brine as a marinade. It would probably be too strong flavored for a chicken, though.
Note: for another interesting article about Chinese culinaria, see this: http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2011/11/best-roast-duck-in-san-francisco.html
[http://atthebackofthehill.blogspot.com/2011/11/best-roast-duck-in-san-francisco.html]
Best roast duck in San Francisco.
Yes, the comment above is ‘spammatic’. But it’s vegetarianly spammatic. And this blogger has little problem with spammatoria that leads directly to lovely food-pictures.
That being one of the things that I too enjoy.
Mmmm, food!
And, given the particular subject of the post underneath which it is appended, lovely pictures of food are completely appropriate.
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