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.

So, corwin and I went to Paris (yes, France) in December 2021, to celebrate our 30th anniversary and also to celebrate our latest booster shots and go somewhere that still had COVID regulations in place that made sense to us. (Of course we know so much more now about re-infection and all, but this post is not about that.) At the time I posted a long twitter thread with lots of photos but who knows if Twitter is even going to be around or functional soon, so I’m reposting here, with some tweaks for blog format:

So, the big thing that got us out of our semi-quarantine and all the way to Paris was some friends invited us to join them for what promised to be a stellar meal, a tasting menu worthy of corwin and my 30th anniversary. So, yes, here is a food porn thread!

It’s my first time in Paris, and we had been here a few days already before the night of the big dinner, but hadn’t made it over toward the Eiffel Tower yet. We took the Metro from our hotel in the 11th arrondissement and came up to a stunning view.

The Eiffel Tower at night, across a moonlit river Seine, is pretty hard to beat. Our destination was just across the water, where a couple of the world’s most decorated chefs have set up for 100 nights. You can’t really call that a “pop up,” can you?

Alain Ducasse, the current leader in most Michelin stars, Albert Adria, of el Bulli fame, and some of their associates, collaborated on this unique gastronomical effort and they dubbed it ADMO and situated it in the Musee du Jacques Chirac.

I’d love to talk about nothing but the food, but really it’s not possible to discuss the meal or ADMO without the context, and that context is COVID and the tremendous impact on the restaurant industry, on travel, on the food supply, and on how people gather.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.