My French Kitchen Daily

"Margrets de Canard a l'Orange is a variation on the classic dish of duck with organ. Duck works well with sweet tastes, and this is a quick and stress-free version to prepare." – Harris, My French Kitchen












July 22

Duck may be a little like Lamb: once you have sampled the perfectly executed lamb chop, it is difficult to figure out why you would desire beef; if duck breast is done well, and if the selection is a fresh nice cut, then you wonder why chicken or turkey. In Harris's introduction, she makes it abundantly clear the mission of her book and the style that comes along with it – keep the selections simple, and remember that for the average great French foodie, it is all about the fresh selection of product that you choose. By the case of the duck then we can only sense that anything store bought is clearly not going to exhibit the raw flight of the recently harvested bird. Like so many other food forms, many of us will never truly understand the difference. For Harris, she always points us in the direction of the seller of the fresh; for those of us over here, we would have to rely on the marsh hunters, which many of us did as kids but don't have that access any longer. Once the fresh selection is found, she asks that we cross hatch the skin of each duck breast before cooking. This will allow for a more even rising of heat through the dense meat. Much fat is rendered in duck breast cooking; keep that after cooking for ten minutes. An orange gets segmented and laid over the duck breast, adding orange juice to the skillet with rendered fat juices, then add a corn starch paste, a pinch of grand mariner, and this will be the drizzle over the birds, plus salt and pepper. The photograph to the side of the recipe of a wonderful little French concrete back stoop with Ivy climbing from the ground up along the upper shudders of a narrow glass door. We can smell de Canard, a slight orange accent, wafting alongside those ivy limbs and tantalizing the bedroom inhabitant above.