Peter Craven summer cookbook recipe: Duck a l’orange
Any kind of duck is grand but duck as the French do it, and especially duck a l’orange, is a joy forever.
Every day this summer, we’ll publish an exclusive recipe from a favourite Australian author, dishes made with affection for family, friends or someone special.
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Duck is, of course, the food of the gods. For my generation, even chicken was eaten only as a bit of a treat, so this platonic idea of poultry was heavenly when we first encountered it and has stayed so.
Any kind of duck is grand – think of the glories of Peking duck with all those neatly folded bits and that richness of the plum sauce – but duck as the French do it, and especially duck a l’orange, is a joy forever.
Did I first experience it with some older sophisticated man who was teaching me the ABC of French food from onion soup up? Or is the primary memory one of sitting forever in the kinds of restaurants that observed the ancien regime cuisine (the opposite of nouvelle cuisine) as you made your way through acres of pate, both the terrine and the smooth foie gras variety, followed by orange duck, in the company of a longhaired girl with waterbird looks?
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Peter Craven’s Duck a l’orange
Any kind of duck is grand but duck as the French do it, and especially duck a l’orange, is a joy forever.
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Summer Cookbook
Australia’s favourite authors share their most meaningful recipes.
Of gazing deep into her eyes, while savouring the sheer audacity of orange, that zestiest of tastes, alcoholically enriched and with sugar to spare, in collision with that princely taste of duck?
It made any other form of fowl – including the pheasant and the guinea fowl – seem like unkempt relatives.
So duck a l’orange is tied up for me with the rituals of courting and the fantasia of brie and profiteroles and the whole French caper.
It’s still a stolen pleasure to eat at Melbourne’s France Soir at midnight, but there was a period when, armed with the Larousse Gastronomique and the Proust cookbook, I made my own assay on this unrivalled delight.
2 ducks
Grand Marnier/Cointreau
1 tbsp crushed peppercorns
Juice of 4 oranges
1 cup chicken/duck stock
1 tbsp sugar/4 sachets Splenda
Cornflour
1. Place ducks (preferably fresh) in an oven at 150C and cook for half an hour. Then glaze with boiling water so the skin is tight, then puncture them, draining the fat.
2. Apply lavish quantities of Grand Marnier (or failing this, Cointreau), add crushed peppercorns and the fresh orange juice. Cook for a further hour at 150 degrees, then reduce the temperature to 100 degrees and cook for 30 minutes.
3. Add chicken stock (or better still duck stock). Add more Grand Marnier, with sugar or Splenda, then more stock to taste. For a richer-textured sauce add cornflour. Then turn and cook for a further 30 minutes. Serves 4.
A warning: do not take the shortcut of using pepper-flavoured Gravox or – far worse – plain Gravox in an attempt to bypass the peppercorns or cornflour. Despite general success with my duck a l’orange, the unpeppered Gravox destroyed it for the only millennial who tasted it, who, as a consequence, thinks I’m a culinary moron.
He’ll spend a king’s ransom getting takeaway Thai from Uber Eats rather than touch anything I have cooked. My only satisfaction is that he, who fancies himself a master in the kitchen, cooked for a vegetarian girl a meal of bowel-perforating, semi-raw vegetables which reminded me of the food my baby boomer (female) contemporaries cooked in their novice days. As a consequence, I ate sparingly. Like Huck Finn, I’d been there before.
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Peter Craven is one of Australia’s best known critics and describes himself as a “highbrow hack”. He founded literary magazine Scripsi, (which published everyone from Susan Sontag to Helen Garner), with Michael Heyward. Craven is as much at home talking about television as he is holding forth on the Bible, James Joyce, or Proust and has also written a lot of topical opinion pieces. He delivered a lecture for the Ramsay Centre last year, has written about Robert Hughes and Helen Garner in the current Meanjin and about Cormac McCarthy in the forthcoming Quadrant.