Turkey is Out, Duck is King

or how to blow your budget on five pounds of meat

Hi! By some stroke of luck you’re reading, “Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman.” Have you subscribed?

I am not the kind of person to buy a forty-five dollar duck, I tell myself, starting to waver in front of the meat case at Wegman’s as I heft a five-pound rohan duckling in my hands. I wouldn’t, right? Forty-five dollars for one bird is absurd - it isn’t even wild-caught. It is large, and quality-looking with a French-sounding provenance, but I can’t justify spending half a week’s grocery budget on one meal, right?

My internal compass is silent. Scared of the price tag, perhaps. Or maybe it is just really hungry and wants me to cook that duck ASAP.

I cast an eye toward the fish case, knowing full well that Andrew and I have paid nearly half that price on a splurge-y weekend when we wanted two neat, glistening white portions of sea bass to take home for our dinner. This duck is meant to feed a party of nine, and surely if you divvy up the cost of a fat duck for roasting, this only comes out to about five dollars a head...maybe it isn’t the duck that is overpriced; maybe having people over for dinner is expensive in itself, no matter what you feed them.

Beans, I hear my inner conscience say. Beans are cheaper than ducks. You could feed nine people on beans for quite a long time and never reach forty-five dollars.

But I don’t want to cook beans. I want to cook a duck. There is nothing festive about beans. Beans are everyday. Beans are “I’m looking after my health.” Beans are “I thought tomorrow was pay-day but it’s actually next week.” Beans are not the vibe.

Lots of people eat expensive meats, just not Andrew and I. It’s not everyone who subsists on chicken thighs and the occasional salmon or shrimp. Some people cook skirt steak, pork shoulders, all kinds of cuts of beef and pork and seafood that all cost over ten dollars a pound. Those people wouldn’t bat an eyelash at a forty-five dollar duck. Then, too, you have the wine drinkers who shell out forty-five dollars apiece (and more) on bottles of wine to bring to the table. Wine-drinkers wouldn’t be astonished at the purchase of a duck for the thanksgiving table. It’s all about what you value; it’s all what brings joy to you and your guests.

And it’s only once a year.

I examine the duck once more and place it back on the shelf, then choose another one a few ounces smaller; this one costs only forty-one dollars. It feels like an important distinction, somehow a little more attainable, somehow a little less crazy.

Forty-five dollars was gratuitous; forty-one dollars is nearly thirty-nine dollars, and once you get in the thirties you’re almost down to twenty-seven, and twenty-seven is what you would pay for dinner when out on a nice date, and we went out on a nice date a couple weeks ago, remember?

(I am very good at rationalization)

A vision of the duck - lacquered amber skin gleaming between garnishes of rich pomegranate and orange wedges - blooms before my mind’s eye. It is very gorgeous and very delicious and in a cinematic moment, we all denounce turkey forever and ever, amen.

That decides it. I place this duck carefully into my shopping cart and along with it, a small chicken to roast as well. (In case anybody is afraid of eating duck, or doesn’t like duck, or otherwise.)

This duck better make good on all its promises to be the most satisfying thing to have ever come out of my oven.

This duck better make me forget I ever saw the price tag.

Come to think of it, it’s all rather a lot of pressure to put on five pounds of inanimate meat, but we have come to this.

It all began with my life-long ambivalence about turkey - I’m just not a turkey kind of person. At Thanksgiving I put a perfunctory few slices on my plate and nibble at them in between bites of ragingly-tart cranberry sauce and ethereal mashed potatoes and the weirdly delicious cheddar and broccoli casserole my aunt makes. And it isn’t like I’ve experienced only poorly-cooked turkeys - in my three decades of life I’ve eaten all kinds of turkey smoked, roasted, basted, and lovingly coddled by expert cookers-of-turkey and still, it leaves me feeling completely cold. I’m sorry to my husband and others who hunt through amusement parks for the one kiosk selling smoked turkey legs. You can have mine.

Duck is another matter, though. I’ve always wanted to cook a duck and when my sister and I decided that we’d finally pull together a Thanksgiving dinner party with a handful of friends, the concept of turkey was the first thing to go out the window. Luckily, Sarah also is unmoved by that largest of poultry. This month, Bon Appetit magazine happened to have an entire article on “what if you don’t like turkey,” and their recipe for a pomegranate and honey-glazed duck seemed to exactly fit my mood.

This is how I end up in Wegman’s, spending a king’s ransom for a relatively small bird.

This is how I end up taking that duck home, and rationalizing how it will pay for itself easily with a random item I sold on Facebook Marketplace.

This is how I howl with pain when I ship that item and find out the shipping cost more than the purchase itself.

This is how I realize that money stresses me out far more than it should, and that if buying one duck is going to tip me into financial ruin (it isn’t) then I have more issues going on than feeling torn about my choices about what to feed dinner guests.

Thursday morning comes. Time to dry-brine the turkey! According to the Bon Appetit recipe, this will involve pricking the duck all over and rubbing a mixture of salt, sugar, herbs, and orange zest into and under its skin, then leaving it to “brine” uncovered in the fridge for up to forty-eight hours. Because I am brining it late Thursday afternoon, I will be going nearly the full forty-eight hours, beginning to roast it Saturday around 2 P.M. I gather the ingredients, mix them, and set it aside.

So far so good.

Nobody in Bon Appetit told me about the neck of the duck and how very long and peeled and...and snake-like it is. Thankfully I happened across a video that showed how to whack the neck off at its base and save it for stock, reminded me to take the bag of giblets out, and also showed the way to trim off the huge flap of fat and skin hanging off the end where the neck had been attached.

Then I take a small, very sharp knife and score diagonal cuts along the duck on either side of the breastbone, also per instruction from the video I was lucky enough to find. I slice only through the skin, not into the meat. With a toothpick, I prick the skin of the duck on all sides, making a score of tiny holes into which I will massage the dry brine. Because ducks have a lot of fat in their skin, this pricking-and-scoring of the skin is a vital step. Without it, the fat can’t render properly and the skin will shrink and curl, resulting in a messy-looking bird, with thick, inedible skin.

Although I trust their recipes implicitly and subscribe to the physical magazine, a large complaint I have about BA is how much they fail to explain to the average American cook who doesn’t spend most of their days handling expensive ingredients. It happens frequently (“Six Quick Weeknight Dinners!” - we won’t mention the fact they all rely on a coven of obscure spices you might not have in your cupboard.)

I feel that if you’re listing a recipe that is meant to replace turkey on the Thanksgiving table, you maybe ought to clue somebody in on how differently a duck must be treated than a turkey, so that they don’t ruin their piece de resistance that costs twice as much as a turkey and feeds half as many people. In addition to this, it might bear mentioning that the star anise you’re liberally using in this recipe will cost you at least an additional ten dollars. And that you’ll spend another $15-$20 in fresh citrus and pomegranates to garnish the platter. And that if you didn’t own a roasting pan, now you do. And that all in all, this friendly alternative to the Thanksgiving turkey is no Butterball brand .69/pound holiday deal, but an $80-$100 dollar main course for the handful of glitterati around your Friendsgiving table.

Not that it isn’t worth it, I just think perhaps it should come with a “This Isn’t The Budget Option” warning label. Like lobster!

I digress. I massage the dry brine into the duck’s skin, working it down into the body cavity, the small tooth-pick holes, beneath the skin in the diagonal score-lines, all around the top and bottom of the duck, then truss up its legs so that they are lifted slightly. This way they will brown more evenly in the oven. At last I clear space in our fridge for the giant, plum-colored roasting pan I now own, and settle the duck into the cold darkness for a two-day nap

Come Saturday, the mood is high. We’re prepared, we’ve sent out texts on where to park and what to wear (“Dress like we are characters in our mid-thirties from a cool TV show with a good costume designer”), and the house is delightfully clean.

I pull the duck out of the fridge an hour before I plan to roast it - always a good idea so that some of the chill can come off the meat before you accidentally cool down the entire oven and throw off the roasting groove. The meat looks darker and drier than it did - almost like…jerky. I rinse the roasting pan and re-settle the duck, hoping against hope that I didn’t somehow screw it up with this long dry brine and all the unscripted prep-work I did on the duck. Trust the process, Rach. It will all come out right. Don’t worry.

When the oven comes to temp I turn the duck breast-side down and begin the roast, letting it cook for forty minutes before flipping it right-side up and cooking for another forty minutes. The fat renders out of the skin and bastes the meat lovingly, leaving my hands free. My oven sizzles and pops and a golden smell fills the kitchen - it smells nothing like the chicken I roasted with shallots this morning when I panicked that a duck and a pork loin wouldn’t feed nine guests - and what if someone wasn’t eating pork and didn’t like duck? The duck smells rich and fatty and each time I peek into the oven I am thrilled to see that without any effort on my part, this duck is looking fine as hell.

The last step is to make a glaze, paint it onto the duck, and then rest easy as the duck has one final fifteen minute sizzle-party in the hot oven. This I do, and a short while later am rewarded when I pull the roasting pan from the oven, tip the juices out of the duck, and settle this perfectly shellacked, wholly gorgeous duck onto a white platter. I blink at it, mesmerized and thrilled beyond belief.

It is marvelously shiny; as polished and russet-gold as a cherry-wood table, perfectly burnished with not a single pale or overcooked spot on the entire bird. Relief washes over me too - I haven’t screwed it up with all my additions to the recipe, it’s cooked now, and it looks incredible.

When it cools a little I bring my copy of the magazine over and copy Bon Appetit’s suggested plating: festive heaps of orange wedges and pomegranate arils, sprigs of green thyme showing here and there. And then it is finished: a thing of beauty with its fruit and its shiny skin, its pan drippings set aside to make a pot of fragrant basmati rice, its whole self looking like something you’d see in a dollhouse kitchen. Like something out of Beatrix Potter’s A Tale Of Two Bad Mice when the main characters take to smashing all the perfect plaster dollhouse food because none of it is edible.

Only, I’ll excommunicate anybody who tries to smash this duck.

It looks gorgeous and expensive and later, after our guests arrive and make me wait till everyone has looked at the duck and appreciated it, we discover that it tastes gorgeous and expensive too, drizzled with some of the reserved glaze. And that’s all we want, really. We want a moment to fling all proprietary budgets and concerns to the wind, to sit down with friends and eat good, lavish food and to feel posh and happy. And the food which everyone has brought to share is luxurious and warm and nourishing in the extreme - the perfect food to make you feel posh and happy.

We heap our “charmingly mismatched” plates (because I don’t own nine of anything) again and again - maple roasted root vegetables tossed with goat cheese in a kale salad; tender pork loin over spicy harissa leeks and greens; roasted carrots drizzled with tahini and crunchy pistachios; tart cranberry sauce in two forms; potatoes au gratin in a giant blue cocotte; bread knots; sleek quenelles of butter topped with flaky Maldon salt; Thai tea sweet potatoes with a salty coconut crumble; delicious drinks and candlelight and the crackling of a Netflix fireplace on the television behind us because it’s too warm inside with our bodies and our good cheer to light up our real fireplace.

We’ve moved our furniture around and filled our living room with two tables end to end. The space that seems just adequate for Andrew and I together has comfortably stretched and expanded like a Room of Requirement to fit nine of us tonight, and no one is uncomfortable or too squished. If we can’t remember where the rest of the sheet trays are because we stashed them on top of our washing machine, that’s okay. If the borrowed wine glasses are sitting on our coffee table which is crouched in a corner of our kitchen because we are out of counter space and don’t own a bar cart, that’s okay! And if guests put their purses on the staircase because our tiny hall closet was stuffed to the brim with coats and yoga mats and things we put away to make room for the tables, that’s okay too. Everyone is happy. None of us knew absolutely everybody in the party, but we are relaxed and full of laughter, eager to listen, and sharing stories we will not soon forget.

It is my favorite kind of night.

Already, I’ve forgotten the price tag. Whatever it was, I’d pay it over again in triplicate to experience all of this. The duck was entirely worth it; turkey could never have made this magic. When can we do it again?