Happy new year, everyone! I haven’t been able to read as many of the great new year/old year posts that everyone is writing lately, because we are moving this week. It’s all a bit sudden, and we have many, many books to pack, not to mention all the other stuff. This is when I realize that i really ought to acquire/keep fewer things.
My mom is still here (poor, long suffering mom), and she was trying to count how many times she has moved in her life. She gave up — it has been that many! (Consequently, she is a real pro. Oh thank you long suffering mom for helping me with this insane move!!) She moved plenty before she got married to my dad, and things just got more interesting after that. The first place they moved to, after meeting in Paris and getting married in Greece, was Nairobi. This was in 1969.
My parents’ landlord was the owner of a bookstore, and my mother said she got a lot of great books from there, many of which we still have and some of which we are packing up this week. One great favorite that she kept with her own collection (now in NYC) was a book called Chinese Gastronomy, by Hsiang Ju Lin. It is out of print under that title, but she bought a copy for me some years ago under its new name, The Art of Chinese Cuisine (same exact book inside). It is a fantastic book, written in a calm and conversational style that is a real pleasure to read. The book is so good, in fact, that the recipes are gravy. But they are very good recipes. And that is the book that my mother has always referred to when she is getting herself psyched up to make Peking duck. Here is an irresistible little quote, in the lengthy introduction to the Peking duck recipe: “It is very difficult to think of a comparable dish in Western cooking. It most closely resembles a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich in its distinctions between textures and delicate flavors.” I know. Just buy the book.
We made two in one week, and I have to say that it’s not so hard, it’s just that you can’t decide to do it on the spur of the moment. The reason for this is that the duck has to get really dry before you roast it so that the skin will be nice and crispy. To achieve this, you hang the duck for at least a day. We hung ours for two. First we rubbed the inside of the body cavity with salt and hung it up for a day, then rubbed vodka all over it and hung it all day and that same evening we rubbed it with sugar water (2T sugar + 1T water) and let it hang another 24 hours before roasting it. This is more or less how the book describes it, although the process is shorter in the book. At the end of all that, we ended up with a sort of duck jerky:
(To see what it looked like before, I refer you to the post previous to this one. You will notice that duck looks soft and flabby while this one is more wizened. You may also notice that the duck is hanging the wrong side down. This we corrected shortly after the photo was taken!)
Notice how my mom tied the wings to lift them up from the body? We did that on day two, when my mom noticed that the skin wasn’t drying much under the wings. Then you heat your oven to 375 F/180 C and place a tray with some water at the very bottom of the oven and the rack at the middle and roast the duck for about an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half. We found that we needed to turn it once after an hour, then turn it again about 15 minutes later, so we did it for an hour and a half. And boy does it get brown:
I guess some people like their duck in pancakes, but we like it in steamed buns. I will post that recipe tomorrow and show you what the duck looked like when we ate it!
My parents left Nairobi in 1970, and my mother was terribly sad. She was sure she would never go back, and I suppose it was a perfectly reasonable expectation. But we moved there as a family when I was 8, and we stayed for six years which just goes to show that you can be sure of something and feel it in your bones, but that doesn’t mean it will turn out that way necessarily.
