Duck à l'orange
"The culinary equivalent of flared trousers." Gordon Ramsay
Well Gordon Ramsay is sort of right - this is a 'retro' dish. It's also not a treasured French peasant dish, now risen to 'classic' status. It was never a French peasant dish I think. The 'legend' here, and most people seem to believe it, is that it's actually an Italian, nay Florentine dish - Papero alla Melarancia - another one brought to France by Catherine de Medici and her 40 Italian chefs back in 1529 when at the age of 14 she came to marry the future Henri II. Of course there is an alternative version - from the Arabs of course - and the Middle Eastern custom of combining meat with fruit. Sometimes you would think that Catherine de Medici and the Arabs are solely responsible for French cuisine. The Arab version maintains that the dish was probably well known long before Catherine de Medici hit France.
Gordon Ramsay is right though in that this is a dish which was highly popular back in the 60s and 70s. It was on virtually every restaurant menu. So much so that my husband, who travelled a lot for work back then, once met a guy in a hotel restaurant who was on a quest to find the perfect Duck à l'orange by eating it everywhere he found it. And note that it is almost always known as Duck à l'orange, not Caneton à l'orange or even Canard à l'orange. 'Caneton' is duckling, 'canard' is duck. I also note that although duck is a very persistent feature on menus in the French centre, west and south-west you mostly get Magret de Canard, or Confit de Canard. I can't actually remember ever being presented with Canard à l'orange as an option. Stephanie Alexander seems to concur because she doesn't mention it in her book on South-West France although she certainly does duck.
And according to the chef at France-Soir, Melbourne's best-known French bistro, it is not a dish the French eat at home.
"I can't remember anyone eating duck at home. We would have pintade - guinea fowl - but it was a much bigger bird and cheaper. Chicken is traditionally the bird for home eating. Duck à la orange is a great restaurant classic - showy and one of the first examples of the mix of sweet and sour in the French menu."
His version is shown at left and you can find the recipe here.
I am talking about this dish today because Gabriel Gaté who is a bit of a retro caricature himself in a way made it on one of his Taste le Tour programs. Here is the video.
And here is his his recipe. Roast duck fillet with orange and hazelnuts. As you will see it is not the classic version which is made with a whole roast duck, but a more modern, easier and quicker dish which also has nuts in it.
Robert Carrier though, another retro guy, does include this dish in his Great Dishes of the World, unlike yesterday's cassoulet. Elizabeth David too, has it too but she really just describes the sauce and she doesn't comment on it much at all.
If you want the genuine thing you can do no better than go to Serious Eats which has a really long, detailed entry about the history and how to make the dish. The photo at the top of the page is the finished version and I have to say it looks pretty tempting. Felicity Cloake, rather surprisingly, has not had a go at Duck à l'orange, but from all the recipes I saw Serious Eats had the most comprehensive version - complete with a whole lot of 'how to' pictures. Both Jane Grigson and Mastering the Art of French Cooking seem to think the preparation of the duck itself is the most complicated part of the dish. Here is Jane Grigson's version, which she swears by, but to me is virtually impossible. So just for a laugh:
"Rub the duck over with two tablespoons of gin, vodka or whisky. Tie string around the thighs, leaving enough cover to suspend the duck from a broom handle laid across two chairs, or from a convenient drawer knob. Put a large dish underneath to catch drips. Train the cold blast of a convection heater on to the duck for an hour. Alternatively, rig up a hair-dryer. If the weather is blowing a dry gale from Siberia, hang the duck outside in the wind, out of the reach of cats. " [What about birds?]
You then simmer the duck in flavoured liquid for an hour and then:
"Put back to blow dry again, for a further hour. The skin will look very smooth, with a faint sheen. This can be done a day in advance, but keep the duck suspended and swinging free." Jane Grigson
Well what a performance! Is she serious one wonders? And yet in her introduction to the recipe she says:
"The business with the duck before you start cooking it sounds laborious. In fact, like bread-baking, it is no more than a matter of organising a few simple procedures into your normal routine. The end result is a wonderfully crisp skin with a good flavour. I now almost always roast duck in this way." Jane Grigson
Not me I think. Mind you lots of the more 'classic' versions take longer than a day because they do various things with the duck before roasting it. And by the way a duck might look big, but really it will barely feed two! And unlike venison, which apparently has no fat at all and so you need to slather it with fat, duck has oodles of it.
This is another 'serious' version from famed French chef Jacques Pépin. It actually doesn't look all that classy to me. I think the version at the top of the page is far classier looking.
In spite of all the complications that I just told you about this is basically just a roast duck with a sauce - sauce bigarade - which is made with Seville oranges. The purists poo poo the people who substitute sweet oranges mixed with lemon and probably those who substitute marmalade, but there is obviously a desire for the sour and the sweet that cuts through the fat richness of the duck.
"One roast duck, skin crackling and crisp; alongside or spooned over the top, a brown sauce made from a base of beef or veal stock, flavored with the juice and zest of bitter oranges and sharpened with a sweet-sour gastrique made from sugar and wine vinegar." Daniel Gritzer - Serious Eats
"a really good one, with crisp skin, succulent meat, and a velvety citrus sauce that tastes like concentrated sunshine—is a thing too delicious to succumb to the vagaries of fashion." Beth Kracklauer - Saveur
But let's. Succumb to the vagaries of fashion that is, and look at what the modern chef does. Well, mostly like Gabriel Gaté they simplify and at the same time complicate and change by adding more and different flavours.
Nigel Slater has two versions - Orange and duck with ginger and citrus and
Donna Hay also has two versions, both featuring juniper, and the orange seems to almost play a minor role. You can find Crispy, juniper orange and thyme duck with celeriac and cauliflower purée online. But not Orange and juniper roasted duck. It's pretty simple though - you just marinade 4 duck Marylands in 2 tspns juniper berries, 8 lightly crushed cloves of garlic, peel of two oranges, 1 tbsp brown sugar, 11/2 cups port and 10 bay leaves, then roast on top of potatoes.
Delia is one of those who uses marmalade as a substitute for the bitter oranges. And why not - you can always get Seville orange marmalade? And like Donna Hay she uses port.
Taste.com interestingly doesn't really have a version.
Then to finish I thought I would look at the fusion chefs. And lo and behold here are two really rather different versions - a long way away from the original really. All you can say really is that there is duck and there is orange.
First of all Ottolenghi.
It's called Seared duck breast with blood orange and star anise and I suppose is not an awful long way away from one of Nigel Slater's version.
And finally Luke Nguyen, who, of course, is of Vietnamese origin. Vietnam being an ex French colony, he offers a mostly Asian version but with touches of French called Vit Nau Cam (Vietnamese Duck à l'orange) (shown above) I'm not really sure you could call this Duck à l'orange at all really but it does show how times change. Oranges are Asian after all.
I wonder why Duck à l'orange went out of fashion - the 'classic' version anyway? Although the people at France-soir claim that they have kept it on their menu because of customer demand. It's a little bit difficult, though not impossible, to buy whole ducks these days, although the bits - Marylands, breasts are easily obtainable at your local supermarket. Perhaps that's the reason why the recipes changed to adapt. It's a chicken and egg thing isn't it? Which came first? The duck pieces or the recipes?
I saw turkey drumsticks in Aldi today on special. Now that's a new thing is it not? I almost bought some. Now I think that will be a case of the product before the recipe. Not sure there would be many recipes out there for turkey drumsticks. They were very big.
