ceciliatan

Duck Day 2024: Foods & Dishes You Can’t Get Anymore

Here we go, our annual Thanksgiving gourmet cooking extravaganza, in which we make no turkey, but do make duck. Each year with a different theme.

This entire menu came about because when we sat down to plan this year’s theme and looked into our notes for recipe ideas, one said “choco taco” and another said “numb nuts ice cream sundae.”

You might think that meant we wanted to do all frozen confections, but no… the common thread that connects those two dots is “Foods you can’t get anymore.”

The ChocoTaco was infamously discontinued in 2022, more on that later. “Numb nuts” were one of the bar snacks we often enjoyed at a restaurant called Night Market, which had been a terrific but somewhat short-lived (2014-2019) place in Harvard Square. At Night Market, chef Jason Tom plied his jazzy takes on Asian street foods in a tiny street-art decorated basement space that made it feel like a fried-rice speakeasy.

I’ve often recreated a few of Night Market’s standards at home, including their sweet kaya toast served with a raw egg yolk swimming in soy sauce. (This reminds me I have yet to try making their “Lik’Em Stik”, which was rice balls served with a “dip” of tasty bits that included black beans, fried garlic, and other stuff—maybe crunchy soy beans? maybe chili crisp? tiny dried shrimp?—I’m not sure exactly what was in it and this may be part of why I haven’t yet tried to recreate it.)

Anyway. We all know that yearning for a dish we can’t get anymore. This menu is an homage to restaurants we miss.

Mirrored from Cecilia Tan.

Now that I finally posted last year’s Duck Day notes and photos, I can do this year’s, which had the theme of “Bistronomy.” This year’s meal had the constraint on it that we were going to be in Singapore for the TwoSet Violin concert and wouldn’t get back until basically 6 days before Thanksgiving — functionally 5 days since jet lag wiped out an entire day — and normally we would have to start more than a week in advance to both source all the ingredients and do other prep of pickling, growing sprouts or herbs, etc etc. So we knew we had to keep ourselves from getting too ambitious, and we wouldn’t have time to run test recipes.

As it turns out, we’ve got so much stuff in our larders and already in process, though, and have stockpiled so many cooking techniques over the past several years, that we could pull it off in 5 days without straining ourselves too badly.

This year’s meal was highly influenced by last year’s trip to Paris. (The trip to Singapore was of course also an influence but there’s no way we were going to come home and try to work out Peranakan cuisine in 5 days, so it’s only there in a few spots.) In addition to the fancy ADMO dinner, we also managed to eat at Septime, one of the leading restaurants in the “bistronomy” movement. If you are from the Boston area you might have eaten at Journeyman, which was also a very bistronomic place. The Green Goddess in New Orleans was another notable US entry to this type of restaurant, and my fave is Edison Food Lab, Jeanie Pierola’s original place in Tampa (still there!).

“Bistronomy” was coined when various chefs, trained in the usual French haute cuisine style, found themselves not wanting to spend seven figures on tableware and having to have a huge staff needed for the typical fancy restaurant, and instead preparing a hyperlocal, constantly changing menu in more casual settings. (I’d almost call it “food forward” if it weren’t ludicrous to imply that stuffier, more traditional restaurants were not somehow also about the food…?)

Among the hallmarks of bistronomy: pickling your own stuff in house, growing your own herbs (since you are a small place and not trying to do 200+ covers a night…), inventive “outside the box” fusion…. heeyyyyyy, does this not sound like the way corwin and I cook and eat all the time?? A second theme emerged, though, which was basically: reuse – recycle – repurpose.

So he bought the Bistronomy book by Jane Sigel (get it on Bookshop, Amazon, Indie boosktores) just to look at recipes and read up on the history a bit more, and we planned our menu while jaunting around Singapore. (I think we were at the Michelin-starred restaurant Meta, which is deeply Korean while at the same time being very much in the French tradition of fine dining, when we came up with most of the menu.)

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

For this year’s Duck Day theme we decided on the Silk Road. This was mostly because corwin wanted to figure out a theme that would encompass both duck shawarma and tandoori duck. Since both those things are quite heavy/filling, I wanted to come up with other dishes that would be lighter. Bam, I thought of the Silk Road and we were off and running.

As it turns out there was not a single “road” but a network of trade routes that stretched from the Philippines at one extreme all the way to the Mediterranean coast at the other, with some land routes and some sea routes. So the meal could start in Thailand, slip past the Philippines, hit mainland China, trek through India, Egypt, and modern-day Turkey/Israel, with dessert coming to rest in Italy.

1. Opening Cocktail: “Long Thailand Iced Tea”
2. Amuse: Duck Arroz Caldo
3. Dumpling course: a duck soup dumpling, a duck “char siu” bun, and a duck seven-spice sausage
4. Soup course: Duck wonton soup
5. First Main: Tandoori duck with kale saag paneer fritters, garlic naan, and raita
6. Palate cleanser: Egyptian mint tea sorbet
7. Second Main: Duck shawarma with homemade pita, labneh, zhoug, and babaganoush
8. Cheese course: rose-water candied dates stuffed with bleu cheese, various cheeses, with homemade crackers, honeycomb
9. Dessert: Olive oil cake with pistachio gelato and candied citrus
10. Followed by tea/coffee and mignardises (hibiscus marshmallows, pistachio white chocolate truffles, dark chocolate truffles)

(If you’re not familiar with the Duck Day tradition, here’s the tl;dr — corwin doesn’t like turkey all that much and always wanted to make duck and his mother never would. So when he went to college in 1986 he decided to make duck for Thanksgiving and has been doing so every year since. This year we got lucky and only 14 people out of our guest list could make it–we’ve had as many as 28, which is the max we can fit into our house for a seated, plated, coursed meal, which this is. Not surprisingly, it’s SOOOOOO much easier to cook for 14 than for twice that many.)

To just see lots of photos of the meal and prep, take a look at my November 2015 Instagram feed, where I also have some small videos. To see descriptions of the dishes, recipes, and embedded photos, keep going under the cut:

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Here’s a recap of yesterday’s Duck Day festivities, including recipes, photos, and whatever else I think to include.
Relevant to those new to this blog: corwin has been celebrating “Duck Day” (Thanksgiving) ever since he went to college (M.I.T.) in 1986 and he and his friend Scliff cooked duck instead of turkey because corwin likes duck much better than turkey. Over the decades the meal has evolved along with corwin’s culinary skill. I entered the picture in 1992. In the past 10 years especially the complexity (and execution) of the meal has really ramped up as we keep challenging ourselves, reading books, eating at some of the best restaurants in the world (see previous blog posts about our recent trip to Barcelona…), and studying molecular gastronomy and Science and Cooking.
So, this year with the coincidence of Thanksgiving and Chanukah, I suggested our theme could be Festivals of Lights of various cultures, and we ended up going with: Lantern Festival (China), Festival of Merce (Barcelona), Diwali (India), Thanksgiving (USA), Chanukah (All of Jewdom), Yule (Northern Europe and other cold places).

Mirrored from cecilia tan.