Brown Trout and Blue Mussels: January 2010

Birthday Dinner

When I was a kid, I had duck with orange sauce in a Chinese restaurant in Dumont, New Jersey. That was a portentous meal. Turns out I apparently have some sort of ingrained affinity for duck, all varieties, all preparations. Wild duck, the breasts in a salmis or mole. Domestic duck in myriad ways. Well, maybe not pelagic sea ducks like scoters, goldeneye, eiders. My father was given a big bag of carefully cleaned and plucked sea ducks from some faculty hunting expedition out of Wayne Hills High School. The entire family was excited. We’d been dying to try the rock and roll recipe for cassoulet from Richard Gehman’s book The Haphazard Gourmet. So we did. Long, elaborate preparation, enormous casseroles, took us the better part of an entire day to get it together. It was drop-dead gorgeous when we yanked it from the oven. And then we tasted it. It had an intense flavor of fish oil. Completely inedible. We had to toss two huge pans of it. I don’t recall raccoons tearing up the trash at the homestead in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey at the time. But I bet they did.

I always cook a duck to celebrate my birthday. This year, Molly, in her little apartment in French hinterlands also cooked a duck to celebrate my birthday. I love a tradition! Oh, I also cook a chicken. Colin, Molly and I eat duck. Jesse and Cathy don’t.

This year I massaged plenty of salt and pepper into the skin of the birds. Stuffed the cavities with fresh rosemary and crushed garlic cloves salted to draw out maximum flavor intensity. Roasted them in a very low oven (275 fahrenheit, 135 centigrade, 408.15 degrees Kelvin according to onlineconversion.com). After 3 or 4 hours in the convection oven they were beautifully moist and tender (I find long, slow cooking vastly preferable to “brining”. The latter gives poultry a slimy or glycerin-y texture that is most unpleasant. I wish the Food Network would give up their obsessive interest in poultry brine). And they were addictively delicious.

I served them with saffron rice and gorgeous fresh brussels sprouts roasted with salt, pepper, olive oil, and a generous squirt of commercial balsamic vinegar.