from the archives: the grandest duck I ever saw

In the year and a half since I wrote this essay about the Marie Antoinette of ducks, this newsletter has gained a whole bunch of readers (and lost a whole bunch of sports fans). Grazing has become a regular, twice-a-week production that pays me a little bit of income, and I’ve become wholly smitten with reading and writing about food (and cooking, and gardening and planning my entire life around my next meal).

Through all that change, this is still one of my favorite posts. I’m on vacation this week — and you’d better believe I’m gathering all kinds of ideas for future Grazing posts — so I figured this was the perfect time to dig up an old story for those who haven’t read it. Enjoy!

And for those looking for even more to read, let me share a recommendation, from New York Magazine, which is a little bit about food and a lot about lunacy: The Battle of Fishkill: When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war.

The upsetting thing about this duck I ate last week is that I am no longer eating it.

In a perfect world, I’d still be sitting at that round table at Cosme, a dim and sleek Mexican restaurant north of Union Square in Manhattan, picking at the juicy scraps of what was once a $98 plate of duck carnitas.

I’m from the Midwest, so the $98 were at one point an upsetting thing, too. (If I search my soul, it still is.) But I was eating dinner with people whose hearts were set on this extremely bougie duck, and I suppose upon picking up the menu of shared plates, I’d implicitly entered into an informal contract to split everything five ways — so I swallowed my corn-fed horror.

And then I met the duck. It — or she, I’ve decided — arrived without pomp or circumstance, alongside a plate of fish and another of vegetables, in a wide cast-iron skillet, smothered in raw onions, watermelon radish, cilantro and parsley. A $98 duck, and they dressed her up in salad. They handed over a bowl of purple corn tortillas, too, to stuff her and her salad-clothes into tacos.

Lucky for me, the duck took up residence on my side of the table, close enough I caught a glimpse of thick, barely-crispy skin peeking out from under all that greenery. I was of half a mind to knock away any ingredient that hadn’t once had a heartbeat and dig into the bird with my fork, but I kept my wits about me enough to remember that the restaurant with the audacity to serve a $98 duck really ought to have a better idea than I do how to best consume said duck.

So I made a taco: two radishes, some onions, a few herbs and an extremely skin-forward hunk of duck. All it took was a spoon to carve up the bird, and the taco was everything I’d imagined: fresh, juicy, fatty, crispy, gone in three bites. There was nothing surprising about the flavor; she tasted exactly like duck and radish and onions and herbs should taste on a corn tortilla, assuming you have found the best duck and the best radish and the best onions and the best herbs and the best person to put it all in the best oven in the world.

Back to the taco, then: It was worth the experience, but after one, I went straight duck. Fork met cast-iron, no preparation necessary. The whole animal would’ve probably made 15 small tacos, but soon everyone at the table was doing what I was, rooting around under parsley and radishes for any last, lingering scrap that might still be bathing in its own rich juices. I feel confident that in the end, we managed to hoover up at least $97.75 worth of slow-cooked, fast-eaten duck before we sent her casket back to the kitchen.

She was the Marie Antoinette of ducks: out-of-touch, kind of fat, gorgeous in spite of her gaudy clothes. And I wish I were still eating her. For the money we paid, I kind of feel like we should still be eating her five days later. She cost as much as a week of groceries, after all. But I’ve come to terms with that, and I don’t think the duck fleeced me. I just think I’m very lucky to be able to have paid to be in the presence of such a duck. I loved her, and I lost her, and no other duck will ever have my heart.