Bonjour et bienvenue, to Tasting History.
Yes, as you can tell by my funny French accent
today we are tasting a bit of French history
with a roast duck recipe served at the wedding of the Marquis de Lafayette.
And we'll take a look at what a feast of such a festive occasion might entail,
at least if you were lucky enough to be a Marquis.
Rouen duckling,
this time on Tasting History.
So I got the idea to do this episode when my friend Stephanie Dray showed me a menu
that was used at the wedding of the Marquis de Lafayette
who most people now know from the musical Hamilton.
"Je m'appelle Lafayette."
She found the menu when doing research for her new book 'The Woman of Chateau of Lafayette.'
See Stephanie is a New York Times best selling author.
How freaking cool is that, that my friend is a New York Times best selling author.
A book such as 'My Dear Hamilton' and "America's First Daughter', all about
the founding mothers of America.
And her new book 'The Women of Chateau Lafayette' is an epic saga based on the true story of Lafayette's extraordinary castle
in the heart of France, and the remarkable women bound by its legacy.
So I will put a link in the description to her website so you can learn more about Stephanie and her amazing books.
Now when she showed me this menu from the wedding of the Marquis, it rang a bell.
Rang? Ring? Ringed a bell? Rang a bell?
Anyways, it was familiar.
It turns out there's a cookbook that I flipped through at some point from 1739 called
'Nouveau Traité de La Cuisine'.
Which had a list of menus in it accompanied by their recipes.
The Lafayette menu comes from this book,
so we are going to recreate one of the dishes served at the Marquis de Lafayette's wedding.
Cannetons de Roüen à l'échalote
Rouen Duckling with Shallots
Take the whitest duckling you can find,
cook it over a low fire wrapped in paper.
Take finely chopped shallots,
put them in a good essence,
serve on the duckling with orange juice.
Well that seems easy.
Almost....
...too easy.
And that is because the author who goes by the pseudonym Menon
was writing for professional chefs. So he leaves out a lot of things that
they would already know off the top of their head.
Luckily Menon wrote several other cookbooks after this for less than professional chefs,
and so we can use some of those to fill in a few of the gaps.
There are still gonna be gaps though.
Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is: one duck,
now really it should be a duckling, but
good luck finding a duckling, at least here in Los Angeles.
I couldn't find one, so I'm using a 5 lb duck. It is what it is.
1-2 teaspoons of salt.
1-2 minced shallots.
And 2-3 oranges.
What kinda oranges?
It's really up to you. They had several varieties at the time in France.
You could go sour like a Seville orange,
or you could go something on the sweeter side.
Orange was so popular at the time that Louis XIV had an entire orangeries built at Versailles.
Now the last ingredient was what Menon calls good essence.
Kinda reminds me of the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.
"You could drink her essence."
And what that is, is stock.
And that was the magic ingredient that chefs would use.
Because back then, and still today, they would build their stock,
over weeks if not months from all the ducks, or the veal or the beef that they had made previously.
I'm not going to be making a lot of ducks so
you know i'm not going to be making my stock from scratch. You can.
I'm not going to. Luckily I have a wonderful French bistro nearby who makes an excellent duck.
And so they were willing to sell me a bit of stock.
You can also get concentrated duck stock online
and that will work as well.
Either way you'll need about a quart or a liter which we're going to reduce to less than a cup.
So first we prep our canard.
Make sure he's well washed and dried, and then rub him down with salt.
Now at this point you can actually put it into the refrigerator over night or a few hours, and that will help to get a crispier skin.
But you'll see that the way that we're cooking it, it actually ends up with a not very crispy skin no matter what you do.
So you can actually just go ahead and cook it right now.
So score the breast just deep enough to expose some of the fat which will allow it to melt out and baste the bird while it roasts.
Just be sure not to cut the actual meat of the bird. Also as I said we are roasting this.
I don't have a spit over an open fire, yet.
But I do have an oven so we're going to be roasting this in the oven even though he says to do it over a low flame.
What we are going to do that he says though is wrap it in paper
And at first I was like why are you wrapping this duck in paper?
Then I realize that sometimes, even now, people will wrap their turkeys in paper or put them in a paper bag
and roast them and it keeps all the juices in. It helps not to dry it out.
So I'm guessing that's the same reason?
But wrap em in paper and put them on a roasting pan and pop em in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, or 176 Celsius.
Now how long you cook the duck really depends on the size of the duck
but you're looking at 20 minutes per pound. You can also use a thermometer to check in.
Like the deepest part of the meat should be 165 degrees Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius.
Now while he's roasting go ahead and start to simmer your essence, or duck stock
until it reduces to about a 1/4, or even less of what you started with.
Now it can take a while but luckily the smell is so good that you not gonna mind.
Also gives me time to let you know that next week I'm going to be doing part 2 of the mead video.
I made mead back in November, or at least that's when the video went up and I said I was going to age the mead for a few months,
and taste it again,
that tasting is next week. I'll also make a dish also from the viking age to go along with it.
So make sure to tune in next week. Do people still tune in?
Click on Youtube next week.
But before we talk of the rough age of the vikings let us talk of the more refined age of 18th century France.
At least if you were rich.
Now Lafayette's wedding took place in April of 1774 in the very last days of the reign of Louis XV who died just a month later.
For context this is also around the time that Disney's Beauty & the Beast is probably taking place. Which makes me wonder
is Lumiere just reading off one of Menon's menus when he's singing 'Be Our Guest'?
Beef ragout, cheese souffle Pie and pudding "en flambe"
I mean he may have just lifted those lyrics.
Though I did look in the Menon book and I never saw anything called the gray stuff, sooooo
fan theory is a little shaky.
Anyway Louis XV is often seen as less ostentatious than his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, the Sun King.
And definitely less wasteful even if that's not actually true .
He's seen as less wasteful than his grandson Louis XVI, or the one who you know got his head cut off.
But he was still a French king, so the man knew how to eat.
This is one of the most important periods in the development of French haute cuisine.
In fact the 19th century gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said
"The reign of Louis XV was no less happy for gastronomy
the spirit of conviviality invaded every class of society.
It is during this period that there was generally established more orderliness in the meals,
more cleanliness and elegance,
and those various refinements of service which, having increased steadily until our own time,
threaten now to overstep all limits and lead us to the point of ridicule."
And he's kind of right because at the point when he's writing
French gastronomy had become a little ridiculous in some quarters.
He is a contemporary of Grimod de la Reyniere, who if you watched the cockentrice episode you'll remember he's the one who
had his funeral during dinner time even though he was still alive just to see who would show up
and miss dinner.
He also had the roast without equal which was 19 birds stuffed into each other. A little ridiculous.
Side note about Savarin who wrote that quote,
he was one of the first proponents of the low carb diet [BOO!]
He said that eating too much wheat and sugar could lead to weight gain,
which was seen as a crazy idea back then.
He's actually really, really fascinating.
And really, really funny and I should probably just do an entire episode on him but!
I am going to say one quote that he gave which I just love because lately I've been missing
having parties with friends, and dinner parties with friends so it is apropos.
"Whoever receives friends and does not participate in the preparation of their meal
does not deserve to have friends."
So like I said Louis XV toned things down from his predecessor
Louis XIV, the Sun King, especially when it came to meal known as the Grand Couvert which Louis XV
only took on special occasions.
But it was done nightly under his predecessor.
See under Louis XIV every night at 10PM
he would participate in the Grand Couvert, or sometimes known as the King's Table.
And essentially that would be where 8 or more courses would be parade out in front of him. Anywhere from 30 dishes
to 170 dishes all at once, over the course of about an hour.
And he would just taste little bits, and everyone was invited to dinner...
...to watch him eat.
They just had to just stand there, or some people got to sit on stools,
and just watched him eat. And there wouldn't really be any talking or anything like that. Music would play.
Every night. Seems kinda boring.
Though I do love the fact that every dish would be announced as it entered the room.
Foie gras for the king.
Les haricots verts for the king.
I want this.
Double stuffed Oreos for Max.
Meatloaf for Max.
How do I get that to happen.
Now with scores or even hundreds of dishes, he wasn't eating absolutely everything.
So he would just nibble on things usually and then the leftovers would be sold to the same courtiers who were watching him eat.
They actually had to pay for their own food at the palace of Versailles.
Though
he did eat quite a bit of his favorite things.
"He could eat four bowls of soup, a whole pheasant,
a partridge, a large plate of salad,
two slices of ham, mutton au jus with garlic,
a plate of pastry, all followed by fruit and hard-boiled eggs."
At least there was a salad in there, so he did get his greens.
So the Grand Couvert was quite the production and Louis the XV thought maybe it was a little TOO MUCH of a production to have
every single night, so it was reserved for special occasions.
He took most of his meals in private,
BUT that is not to say that they were small meals.
A menu from a supper in 1755, mind you supper is the smaller meal of the day,
there were six courses instead of the usual eight.
But one of those courses had sixteen dishes.
They included rabbit, pheasant, quail, turtle doves, sweet breads, veal, and rouen duckling just like we're making today.
And his wife Queen Marie, she also loved to eat.
It's actually said that she ate 9 dozen oysters and 4 large flagons of beer one night,
and got so sick she was given the last rites.
Luckily she did not die.
And even these smaller six course meals were still quite a production, they just didn't have the audience that the Grand Couvert had.
But it was this production that the nobles of France tried to emulate
when having their own large feasts like the wedding of Lafayette.
There were lots of rules and protocol, etiquette if you will, put in place even before the food would arrive.
One of the first things that you did was prepare your napkin which was more like a bib.
"The napkin covered the front of the body down to the knees,
starting from below the collar, and not ticked into said collar."
Now that quote was from 1774 when shirts had become a little more subdued
then the fantastic ruffs of the early 18th century.
Back then, instead of attaching it to your collar you would tie it around your neck.
And that's actually, supposedly, where the phrase to make ends meet. That the napkin had to be large enough to make ends meet.
Though I couldn't find any period references to that, so put an asterisk next to that fact.
So the napkin was there just to stop food from falling on your fancy clothes.
So it was more of a passive protective instrument rather than an active one that we might use to dab our mouth today.
"It is ungentlemanly to use a napkin for wiping the face or scraping the teeth,
and a most vulgar error is to swipe one's nose with it."
Sorry.
Now once your napkin is in place the food would come out in what was known as 'service à la Français'
and that's where each course made of 15 to 20 dishes would come out and be placed on the table for everyone to see.
But not necessarily for everyone to eat.
So many dishes would be set at the table that it would be impossible to try everything,
and food did not get passed around like Thanksgiving.
Really if it wasn't right near you, you weren't going to get any.
So your meal might be complete from somebody at the other end of the table.
And these huge quantities of food and different dishes
required a new setup in the kitchen.
It's the first time that we see not just a cuisiner, or head chef
but also a chef that was specifically dedicated to pastry, and one that was specifically dedicated to roasting meats,
because cuisine was becoming so complex
that no one person could really master all of it.
"No man can be at once great at the oven,
great at the stove, and great at the spit."
But with this focus it really allowed chefs to up their game which is why this period
is so transformative in the art of cooking.
Supposedly with the right skills a good French chef could make anything delicious.
In 'Les Dons de Comus' Francois Marin says
" Everything can be made acceptable if you know how to prepare it,
and it is not yet twenty years since a famous caterer served to some gentlemen (for the lack of others meats)
and old pair of water-buffalo leather gloves,
shredded and stewed, with onions, mustard, and vinegar,
which they found excellent as long as they did not know what they were eating."
French haute cuisine my friends.
Now at each meal one would also drink wine.
Though the wine glasses were rarely at the table.
If you could afford you would have a footman standing behind you with your wine glass and you would just beckon him over
to serve it to you whenever you needed a sip.
And I don't know exactly what wines were served at Lafayette's wedding,
but if they were trying to emulate the royal family it would be a young Burgundy and champagne,
for as Louis XV's mistress Madame de Pompadour said,
"Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman still beautiful after drinking"
And the same has been said of me. A little bit more beautiful with a glass of champagne,
which is why i'll have one with my duck.
So when your essence has reduced down to about a fourth of what you started with it's time to add the shallots.
Now I cook my shallots with a little butter in a pan with a low flame,
just to soften them up a bit but you don't have to. You can put them right into the sauce.
When you do add them just stir them into the sauce and let them cook for about five more minutes.
Then add in the juice of the oranges and stir that in, and continue to simmer until your duck is ready.
Okay, so I cooked the duck in the bag which was great.
But it made it so it didn't really get a crispy skin on the outside
so if you want a crispier skin like so many people do on their duck
take it out of the bag and roasted for another ten minutes.
And it will crisp up. You can also just not use the bag.
Either way once the duck is cooked set it on a plate for about ten minutes to let it rest, and then serve.
And here we are, rouen duckling with a lovely shallot and orange sauce.
This smells SO good. I really wish that-
-well I wish you were here so you could smell it.
Smells so good, the sauce especially.
Lets give it a shot.
Hm! I love duck.
That's REALLY wonderful.
The shallots really shine through. You know what- so-
I thought this was going to be like duck a l'orange, just from reading the recipe,
but it's not because duck a l'orange is
sickly sweet, I like it, but it's very, very sweet.
This has some sweetness to it, but it's not sweet.
The only sweetness kind of, actually comes from the shallots. It's like the sugar in the onions.
I mean the duck is wonderful, it's nice and moist but
this sauce could honestly go on absolutely anything.
I wish I had made more, not like I have anything else to put it on, but I would find something else to put it on.
So there's a little story about Lafayette that didn't really fit into the episode, I couldn't jam it in .
So I'm jamming it in here because it's just too good not to share, and it KINDA has to do with food.
So shortly after coming to America, he was wounded at his first battle which was the Battle of Brandywine,
an aptly named place for a Frenchman to be wounded.
In an interview years later he talks about being taken off the field and laid on a table to have his wounds set.
"The general officers soon arrived,
when I saluted them by begging that they would not eat me up,
as they appeared to be very hungry, and I was the only dish upon the table in the house."
At least he had a sense of humor about it.
Anyway make sure to follow me on Instagram: tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and join me next week for mead tasting part 2, with some other viking age dish.
And I will see you next time
on Tasting History.
The leg is my favorite. So good.