From wild ducks to domestic ducks, after the changes of species, times and food customs, a variety of duck cuisine culture has been born. Food writers from one south and one north, Xu Xiaochun and Feng Dachuan, are looking for the delicate Fujian duck dishes in their memories and the rugged and mellow roast duck in Nanyang, Shandong. Let's look at the duck flavor of thousands of noodles, and the pen and ink are fragrant.
Fujian's ducks can be petted as much as possible
"Her steamed cabbage fat duck is famous, the duck is steamed, it tastes tender and smooth, even the bones can be sipped, and the cabbage is steamed in duck fat and melts in the mouth. Lin Yutang's second daughter, Lin Taiyi, wrote vividly about a duck dish that her mother was good at in "The Biography of Lin Yutang".
Lin Yutang and his wife Liao Cuifeng are both from southern Fujian. Southern Fujian folk generally believe that duck nourishes yin and warms up, so eating duck is popular, braised duck, ginger duck, salted duck, winter powder duck, duck porridge, duck noodles, four things muscovy duck soup...... Including Lin Yutang's favorite steamed cabbage fat duck, even if people are already on the other side of the strait, they still have a strong nostalgia in the duck fat.
Winter Pink Duck
Fujian people eat duck, in addition to pet domestic duck, vegetable duck (water duck), but also pet Muscovy duck. Muscovy duck is named after "Fan", belongs to the foreign breed imported from the Maritime Silk Road, and its characteristics are "as big as a goose, with a slight short foot, and red cheeks like a cockscomb".
The most popular duck dish in Fujian and Taiwan is the ginger duck, which is made of muscovy duck as the main ingredient, and is cooked with the best old ginger (the people of southern Fujian call the old ginger "ginger mother"), black sesame oil and sorghum oil, which has the effect of nourishing the stomach and strengthening the spleen, driving away cold and invigorating the blood. The ginger duck in southern Fujian emphasizes a dry fragrance, while Taiwan is more often made into a soup pot, each with its own flavor, but the "soul" is the same. Nowadays, the new Fujian cuisine has further optimized it, adding high-end ingredients such as abalone, and the value of ginger duck stewed abalone has doubled, and at the same time, the new program of "eating ginger in the first bite, eating abalone in the second bite, and eating duck in the third bite" has been created.
A fusion of tradition and innovation, "Braised Abalone with Ginger Duck"
There are many hot springs in Fuzhou, the city is soaked in the "soup", and the duck is also more fond of the soup and water, such as the red stewed muscovy duck and the buckled taro duck are all famous dishes. Yu Dafu's "Eating Men and Women in Fuzhou" specifically mentions "duck noodles in front of the cang", that is, a "duck noodles" in front of the rice warehouse in Fuzhou's Gulou District, which can no longer be found. In recent years, some Fujian restaurants have restored this "duck noodles", and diners are still flocking to it.
Duck noodles
Fuzhou people have another kind of ultimate nourishing thing about duck, called "duck dew", with the muscovy duck tightly sealed and steamed, without adding a drop of water, a seven or eight catties of muscovy duck, stewed out of the duck dew is just a bowl, used to mix or season, can be called "the king of pet rice". In addition, the Liancheng white duck in the mountainous area of western Fujian can make a whole duck feast; the plate duck in Jian'ou is one of the four major plate ducks in China, which is made on frosty and windy days, and is not salty or firewood; the Wuyi Mountain smoked duck is smoked with red chili peppers all over the body, and the entrance is comparable to the "nine curved ileacles" of Wuyi landscape.
Text, Picture | Xu Xiaochun
Weishan Lake Wild Duck Fishing and Hunting Culture with Nanyang Roast Duck
In Shandong, the Weishan Lake duck is also commonly known as the "hemp duck" because of its similar sparrow feathers to its ancestors. The Weishan Lake Shelduck is one of the four famous ducks in China.
In the past, the fishermen of Weishan Lake had the "Gun Gang" and "Duck Gang", which referred to fishermen who specialized in hunting wild ducks, and then sold them to the "duck pot" on the shore, that is, boiled duck merchants. Now the wild duck in Weishan Lake belongs to the national second-class protected animals, and it cannot be eaten or hunted, but it can talk about this ancient fishing and hunting culture.
Every year in winter, the wild ducks that have gone through the autumn fat in the north will fly to Weishan Lake for wintering, so the duck hunter in white clothes and white hats set up an old duck gun, rowed a small boat, and quietly set off. Ducks are hunted late at night, while they are asleep. There is a Weishan Lake folk song as evidence: "A gun grenade is five feet long, my brother takes my little sister to Ben Ling Wang, patronizing and listening to my sister sing fishing songs, and piles of wild ducks forget to pretend." ”
Plucking the feathers of this wild duck is a troublesome task. As soon as the boiling water is boiled, it will produce oil, and how many degrees the water temperature is controlled is a trade secret, and some people say that it is boiled with rosin and treated like a pig's head hair. I haven't seen it, but I know that there is a more direct method, which is to dry pluck the hair, pull the hair directly down, and then rub it with plant ash, but it is very laborious, then rinse, disembowel, rinse, boil for an hour or two, then take it out to cool, and sell it on the street the next morning.
Although there are also ways to eat local ducks, such as salted duck, crispy duck, air-dried duck, plate duck and the like, it is not as popular and famous as roast duck after all.
In the vast blue waters of Weishan Lake floats a lonely island town called Nanyang. Under the façade of a century-old antique tube house in the town squatted an old duck seller. He took a sip of wine, chewed duck liver and duck paws twice, and from time to time he talked to the shopkeeper in country slang, and in the wicker basket next to him was roast duck covered with dried lotus, which was full of fragrance. Open the soaked dried lotus, the first thing that enters the nose is a burst of lotus fragrance, and when you eat it, you will first have a salty taste, a large material aroma, and then a duck's grassy smell, these flavors penetrate and blend with each other, and the aftertaste is long.
Nanyang roast duck
Strictly speaking, the roast duck in Weishan Lake is "sauce" rather than "roast (braised rice)". As for why it is called roast duck, it is unknown. The duck pot in the town is at least 300 years old, and there are dozens at most. Every year in winter, adults and children are busy going from house to house, and the smell of duck pot wafts on a small street. The reason why Nanyang's roast duck has been famous for a long time is that it is not uncommon for soup pots on the street for hundreds of years. Whether the food out of the marinade or sauce is delicious or not, it is all in the soup, and then it is the original taste of the duck.
When the duck pot is not boiling in the summer, the soup is put aside. First, the best sand soil is screened, and it is also said that it is Guanyin soil, and after it is cleaned, it is put into a pot and fried, poured into a boiling duck soup pot, and the soil absorbs the soup fully, and then puts it in the sun to dry, crush, and put it in a pocket. When you cook it again in the next year, melt it with water, sink the sandy soil, skim out the medicine primer, add ingredients and add water, relying on an old taste. What's more, the wet soil is made into square bricks, which are stored after drying for a longer time.
Cooking duck with soup and recipes for boiling wild duck has a less grassy smell, but it also has a more human touch.
Text, Picture | Feng Dachuan
Editor-in-charge | Chu Honggong
Proofreading | Yutsu
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