Duckish thoughts
Today my thoughts are all about birds. I served duck and chicken at a dinner party tonight. I invented the duck recipe and served the chicken with a late Medieval style sauce. The theme was citrus, basically, with the vegetarian guest getting grilled haloumi with fresh lemon.
I ought to have dwelled on the history of citrus, given the theme, but instead I thought abut birds. I thought about how domestication of ducks and geese and chickens and other fowl meant ready sources of food for people who didn’t have large dwelling spaces. Meat and eggs and fat are important in our diets, so domestication of birds was a major step in assuring regular supplies of nutrition.
When did it happen, though? I’ve seen speculation, but no hard evidence. A long time ago, for certain.
What’s interesting now is that my generation is reclaiming ducks. We have still to reclaim geese. Chicken and maybe turkey were for a generation the only birds readily available in shops: everything else had to be specially ordered.
I’m waiting for pheasant and grouse to be so readily available. Ten years ago I would have laughed if someone had told me I would buy duck marylands in the frozen section of the supermarket (admittedly the specialist Asian supermarket) and invent a recipe for it for a dinner party. Maybe in ten years time I shall have even more choices of fowl.
What I realised (yet again) was that history is not a simple progression in a specific direction. Fashions mean foods come and go. Unless a food is extinct (like silphium) there’s always a possibility of it coming back into fashion and all its magic being revived.
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