Duck Cookbook, The

Rating:
Summary: Ducks, Ducks, Ducks, Ducks, Ducks
Review: The title tells it all. This book is all about cooking duck using most techniques common to other types of meats plus at least one which is unique to duck and other fatty fowl. The nine techniques / preparations chapters are:

Sauteing
Braising
Roasting
Confit - a French cooking and preservation method unique, I believe, to ducks and geese
Smoking
Curing
Soups
Salads
Terrines and Mousses

It's interesting that while poaching is a common cooking technique for chicken, the technique is not included here for duck. This technique is largely replaced by the confit method. This is just one clue to the fact that a duck is different from a chicken and methods which work for one will not work for the other. The biggest difference is the level of fat in a duck's skin (but not in it's meat). This is simply due to the fact that ducks can fly and chickens cannot and ducks spend a lot of time in the water. This also explains why almost all duck meat is dark, more similar to a chicken's legs than to it's breast meat.

The difference between ducks and chickens is the main thing which makes this book valuable in itself, especially since many of the techniques appear to be unique to duck cookery. A second great value to the book is that it spells out the right way to cook to avoid fatty flesh if your primary interest is to avoid the saturated fat without loosing out on the great taste of duck.

Aside from the confit method, one of the best values derived from duck is the high quality of the broth one can make from duck, in many ways as valuable and as flavorful as stocks derived from veal. The only drawback is that to make a decent amount of duck broth, you need 12 carcasses or equivalent amount of leftover pieces.

This book is by far the most complete collection of duck recipes I could find. The next closest sources are the Cooks Illustrated book entitled 'Chicken', with about 28 pages of duck recipes and 'Beard on Birds' by James Beard which has 19 pages devoted to duck, including many of the recipes included in Peterson's book. In fact, it is a sign of the times that Beard's book, published in 1979 (and probably date back at least 20 to30 years before that time) have several recipes on wild duck while Peterson deals exclusively with the two most common domesticated duck sources, the Long Island (or Pekin) duck and the Mullard duck, the most common source of cryovac packed duck breast.

Comparing Peterson to Beard, one finds that while Beard has good recipes, equal to his reputation in American culinary education, Peterson has superior recipes and excellently detailed techniques and explanations for the duck specific methods. Worthy of his book on culinary techniques, the photographic instructions on cutting raw duck and carving roasted birds are impeccable.

Peterson's work has placed him high in the ranks of American cookbook authors and this book is a worthy addition to his canon. In past books, I have occasionally found a bit of less than perfect sequencing of steps, so that one must be very careful to read his recipes through and think them through before beginning, but I find none of that clumsiness here. His impeccible descriptions of a sometimes demanding technique are invaluable.

If I collected cookbooks for no other reason than to be an easy source of recipes, this is the type of book I would most quickly buy. Adding to the values is the selection of excellent oversize paged photographs of completed dishes joining the great color photos illustrating the techniques.

Duck has an aura of luxury about it for a very reasonable price (as long as you leave off the foie gras). This book can be a great access to a new culinary direction. Recommended. Just be sure when selecting recipes that the type of duck matches the recipe. Recipes for fatty ducks may give poor results with leaner birds.