Menu Regional – Perigord, A Duck Fest.

Perigord is a small area in France that is not an actual region but a sub-region. Still we considered it a whole region for our meal because of its culinary importance. The place is known for its ducks and ducks products like foie gras! This lunch was all about duck: we used duck fat instead of oil and butter, duck legs, duck breast, duck wings and fatten duck’s liver of course. The dessert was the only dish that did not contain duck but it might just as well would. Instead it was a really good ice-cream of armagnac and prunes with walnut brownies (which is American but the walnuts grown in Perigord are also known and famous).  We started off with a duck rillettes which is shredded leg meat, cooked in duck fat for the whole night, mixed with some of the fat (a lot) and molded into terrine shape. Then we had a country style soup that’s called “Garbure” and contains just about everything: duck wings, Toulouse sausage, potatoes, carrots, turnips, white beans, meche, pork fat, bacon, cabbage… Everything cooked in an iron cocotte white a chicken broth. This was my group and we worked really hard to cut all the vegetables and follow all the steps according to the very long recipe. For me it tasted like someone couldn’t decide what he wants in his soup so he ended up throwing everything he had inside. It was heavy and not that fit as a first course and due to all the different elements in the cocotte, there was hardly any room for the broth. Still it was a kind of country classic that people actually eat certain versions of it everywhere as a single dish meal, which than makes sense. Then we went on to the “fish” course which was another duck. No fish to this region because it has no ocean or sea so we had our foie gras dish as the third course. It was served with a delicious brioche that was a bit under-baked to keep it really moist and soft, and an apricot-grapefruit jelly candy. The main course was duck breast with a beautiful crispy potato tart, juice of duck and a persillade: chopped parsley-garlic oil. Was really well cooked and I loved it. Last course was the brownies with the ice-cream as I mentioned which were gooey inside and filled with a lot of walnuts. I’m not gonna write descriptions apart from the french names of the dishes at the beginning. You can ask me if something was hard to understand and don’t forget to watch the videos of the birth of the foie gras from the fat duck. It is un-common to see because it’s forbidden to sell the liver that way but we have the school privileges.  🙂

Canard Gross:

Garbure:

Foie Gras:

Penguin shaped foie gras!

Magret de canard:

Gateau chocolat: