Thanksgiving Duck (part one): Duck Ragù with Garganelli

 

The Sherdos, obstinate contrarians, have on the long Thanksgiving weekend decided to cook and write about cooking a fowl that is not a turkey.

As inveterate readers of cookbooks and cooking magazines, we’ve started to feel rather cranky about the fact that, year after year after year, and seemingly for weeks and months on end, every magazine and newspaper and cooking show devotes itself to turkey, turkey, turkey, along with all the other familiar instances of so-called “holiday cooking.”  After all, how many recipes for roast turkey can one reasonably be expected to read, much less to try? 

(Would you like to know how to roast a turkey?  Take a dressed bird, put it in a hot oven and cook it until it's done.  The rest, as they say, is conversation.  Of course there are also innumerable recipes that involve hotter ovens or cooler ones, recipes for frying, steaming or grilling a turkey, and all kinds of brines, garnishes and other strategies that claim to (and sometime do) produce crisper skin or moister meat.  So by all means, have at it.  But it sometimes seems to us that the sheer profusion of recipes for roasting turkey produces the reverse of its intended effect: that is, it has made the simple act of roasting a bird, which is obviously one of the most basic and ancient of kitchen operations, into a sort of arcane mystery, in which somehow the “best” recipe always remains to be discovered, always mysteriously just out of one’s reach.)

Anyway, at last Saturday’s market, Chowdown Farm had fresh ducks for sale, which inspired us to splurge on two of them, so as to attempt a complicated multiple cooking project spread out over several days of this holiday weekend. 

To be sure, duck is a relatively expensive luxury, for good reasons.  Even laying aside the economies of the factory farm, ducks are simply more expensive to raise than, say, chickens.  Although we’re certainly not experts on the subject, our understanding is that chickens can be raised with little more than a small yard with grass and a coop, whereas ducks need water, a larger area, and special food.  So ducks are not really for daily consumption, but something to be saved for a special occasion.

After getting our two ducks home, we first carefully cut off the legs and the breasts.  We put the two remaining carcasses in a big pot, with a cut up leek, a few onions, carrots, celery sticks and a bouquet garni (some parley, thyme, and bay leaves, tied together with string).  We covered this with water, brought it to a boil, turned down the heat, and simmered it overnight, producing a rich duck stock.  (For more on stock-making, see our post on chicken stock from April 28 2012).  The next day we strained and de-fatted the stock, reserving about ten cups (some for the ragù, the rest for another dish we'll write about in part two of this post); and then reduced the rest into a kind of duck demi glace (a sort of concentrated brown sauce with a paste-like consistency), both of which would be crucial ingredients in the dishes we were planning to make.

First up would be an Italian style duck ragù, which we served with some home-made garganelli pasta.  For this you need the stock but not the demi glace.
 
Our very first post was about this garganelli dressed with spring asparagus.  Fresh pasta takes a bit of work, though a few simple and inexpensive tools — like the dedicated cutter that produces nice even squares of rolled pasta, and a simple wooden dowel and board for shaping the garganelli — do make the task a bit easier.

 

As for Ragù: well, this is one of those notoriously contested terms in cookery that can refer somewhat confusingly to a number of different things.  The Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of the word, whose Italian form we’re using here, from the French ragoût, which itself emerges from the French verb ragouster, “to have a taste of, to incite the appetite.”  As a noun, the word usually refers to some kind of highly-seasoned stew of meats, fish or vegetables.  In the seventeenth century, it seems clear that people still heard the word as a kind of compound referring to a dish made “a-gout,” to the taste — or, as it were, a “tasty,” spicy or piquant dish.  For example, in an English translation from 1653 of Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François (1651), a book often cited as the founding text of modern French cuisine, a “ragoust” is defined as “any sauce, or meat prepared with a haut goust, or quicke or sharp taste.”   Susan  Pinkard’s recent A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine observes that, in seventeenth-century France, the words ragoût and fricassee were used more or less interchangeably to mean “dishes cooked in a sauce that incorporated the juices of the principal ingredient, supplemented by other liquids such as bouillon, wine, or cream” (107).  Pinkard also suggests that these dishes developed in the early seventeenth century when the raised stove became common, allowing the cook to maintain a low, even temperature, as various forms of hearth cooking — spit roasting, grilling over the coals, or boiling in a cauldron over open flames — would not. The close watch one keeps over the stovetop ragù was once, then, an innovation.

The word seems to have been imported into English almost immediately.  The English poet William Davenant, in The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House (1656), a sort of loose opera commonly cited as the first new dramatic performance in London after the closing of the theaters during the English revolution in 1642, describes the bounty of a banquet as including

Your Pottages, Carbonnades, Grillades, Ragouts ... and Entremets.

As recently as 1925, in P.G. Woodhouse’s Carry On Jeeves, Bertie Wooster refers memorably to his aunt’s cook Anatole (whom other rich people are always sneakily trying to hire away from her) as “A most amazing Johnnie who dishes a wicked ragoût.”

The Italian ragù, however, is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and flavorings used to dress pasta.  Two of the most famous, of course, are the ragù Bolognese from Emilia-Romagna, that simmers veal, pork and beef in a rich sauce with just a hint of tomato and thickened with milk or cream; and the ragù Napoletano, which mixes chopped meat with lots of tomato — and thus seems to be the ancestor of old-fashioned American “spaghetti sauce.”  In The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper observes that a French ragoût is always a dish eaten on its own (in fact, many French cookbooks use the word as a synonym for "stew"), whereas the Italian ragù is always a sauce for pasta.  Kasper records that the Italian cookbook author Christofaro di Messisbugo served ragù-like dishes at the court of Ferrara in the 16th century, dishes which she believes had much in common with Middle Eastern cuisine, incorporating exotic spices such as rosewater, saffron, cinnamon,  ginger — and of course sugar.  They would almost certainly have tasted sweet to a modern taste.  The modern Italian ragù, she believes, was in effect re-imported into Italy from France in the 18th century, when aristocratic Italians became obsessed with all things French.

Our duck ragù is based on a recipe from Mario Batali, whose description of it as a dish “raised to mythic status” when combined with homemade garganelli captured our imaginations.  Garganelli, a shaped pasta like homemade penne or ziti, comes from the Italian word for a chicken’s gullet (and is thus a linguistic cousin of the English word “gargle”).   

The ragu is actually quite easy to prepare: basically, you just brown your duck legs, then sauté a mixture of chopped aromatic vegetables, and then add tomatoes, wine and stock.  The duck legs are then braised slowly in this sauce.  Finally, the cooked meat is shredded and returned to the sauce, whereupon it's ready to be finished with your pasta.  The original recipe called for chicken stock, but  using duck stock amps up the flavor and distinctiveness of the dish.  And, perhaps needless to add, the ragù is also great with any kind of store-bought pasta — you might try it with the lovely fresh parpadelle from Pasta Dave at the market.   

Duck Ragù with Garganelli

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 duck legs, visible fat removed, patted dry
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 rib of celery, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 4 fresh sage leaves
• 2 cups red wine
• 1 cup duck stock (or substitute chicken)
• 6 oz tomato paste (or substitute about 2 cups of chopped fresh or canned tomatoes)
• Garganelli made from about 1 pound of pasta dough (or substitute about 2/3 lb of storebought penne or ziti)
• Parmesan cheese for grating

Season the duck legs with salt and pepper.  
In a dutch oven, pot, or large saucepan, brown the duck legs for 10 minutes, and remove to a plate.
Add the chopped vegetables, and cook over low to medium heat until soft.
Add the wine, stock, and tomato paste, stir, bring to a boil.
Return the duck legs to the pot, turn down the heat, and simmer, partially covered, for at least one 1 hour or until the legs are well cooked. 
Remove the duck legs, allow to cool slightly, then shred the meat and return it to the pot.
Simmer uncovered another 30 minutes or until the sauce is thick. 

Cook the garganelli until just barely tender, and add to the pan with the sauce.
Toss over high heat for two minutes, adding a splash of pasta-cooking liquid if necessary.
Remove from heat, spoon into bowls, and top with grated parmesan and additional pepper.

(NOTE: This dish should easily serve at least four, but the precise amount of pasta you use is negotiable.  If you're serving only two people, you can freeze half the ragù for later.  Your goal is to have plenty of sauce to coat the pasta well, but not so much that the pasta is swimming in sauce.) 


Make this dish any old day and we promise your loved ones will be humming the old tune from Disney’s Mary Poppins:  “every day’s a holiday with you.”