Duck with Herbs

History

Braised and roasted duck is a cornerstone of Cantonese cooking and of the broader family of Hong Kong roast meats, *siu mei*, and the braising method — simmering the bird in a seasoned stock until the fat renders and the flavor deepens — is one of the foundations of Chinese duck cookery.

The Duck with Herbs printed in the 1914 Chinese-Japanese Cook Book is a shorter preparation than a Cantonese roast duck. It takes soy sauce, rendered in the book as "syou," aromatics of onion, celery, garlic and lemon peel, and a two-hour simmer. That is the whole of it.

Sara Bosse and her sister Winnifred Eaton, writing as Onoto Watanna, adapted Chinese and Japanese dishes for white middle-class American women cooking at home, and they wrote against the anti-Chinese feeling of their moment. Their preface tells the reader: "When it is known how simple and clean are the ingredients used to make up these Oriental dishes, the Westerner will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land." An earlier version of this note quoted that sentence with a word missing.

The version recorded here is a dish for a different kitchen rather than a degraded copy of another one. Chinese-American cooking has its own history and its own standards, and calling it a shadow of some ancestral form imports a hierarchy the record does not support. What an earlier version of this note claimed about that history — that Cantonese ducks are stuffed with more than a dozen herbs, that plum and hoisin sauces were common in northern China between the 1600s and the 1800s, and that this book was the first Asian cookbook published in North America — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 3 to 4 pound duck
• 1 quarter pound pork fat
• 1 onion
• 2 stalks celery
• 1 lemon peel
• 1 quarter clove of garlic
• 2 tablespoonfuls syou
• 1 tablespoonful mixed spices
• 1 cup stock
• 1 dozen mushrooms
• 1 teaspoonful salt
• 1 tablespoonful parsley

Instructions

1. Drain and singe the duck.
2. Wipe the duck thoroughly dry, inside and out, with a clean, damp cloth.
3. Line a pan with small pieces of pork fat.
4. Sprinkle the bottom of the pan with minced onion, celery, grated lemon peel, and finely grated garlic.
5. Lay the duck in the pan and cover with a tablespoonful of mixed spices, two tablespoonfuls of syou, and a cup of rich stock.
6. Set the pan over the fire and simmer for two hours, basting the duck often.
7. Wash the mushrooms and add them to the pan.
8. Cook all together for ten minutes more.
9. Remove the duck from the pan and thicken the gravy with cornstarch or rice flour.
10. Stir in the chopped parsley.
11. Cut the duck into small pieces and arrange on a serving dish.
12. Pour the gravy with the herbs around the duck and serve hot with rice.