Ducking and Peeking

THE FOOD CLUB

First things first. The correct name of the dish is Beijing Duck. And second: the chef can only create magic if the duck is of good quality. Free-range birds won't do.

All that running about will just toughen their muscles. Neither will those ducks do that have been bred for French gastronomy. Their skin is far thicker. It has to be a bird of the species which has become known as Beijing duck: they have the requisite thin skin, and sub-cutaneous fatty deposits.

I've gleaned all this from master chef Liang Xiao Qing of Mumbai's ITC Grand Maratha Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Chef Liang is probably the finest Chinese chef working in India at the moment: he has decades of experience in his native Beijing, has complete mastery over traditional Beijing, Guangdong and Sichuan cookery, yet is not above adding flourishes of his own.

He declines to prepare me Beijing duck, though. "I can't get good ducks here in Mumbai," he laments. In Delhi for an all too brief promotion, he is only praises for the French Farm ducks, and I finally got to taste the national bird of Beijing, just the same way it would be prepared in that city.

The bird is basted with secret spices "" each chef has his own recipe, and it's no use trying to prise it out. It needs to result in a thin, crackingly crisp skin, which has to have an attractive red colour.

Too much sugar in the spice recipe and the all-important colour of the skin becomes too dark and its texture too thick. The bird is air-dried, till not a trace of moisture remains.

Then, it is roasted. Chef Liang uses a normal gas oven for this operation, but in Beijing's famous duck restaurants, a wood-fired oven is used, where the wood of fruit trees imparts a distinctive flavour to the duck.

On the face of it there's little similarity between Kashmiri wazwan and Chinese food, but one thing in common is that both traditions strive to maximise the use of the primary ingredient: lamb in one case, and duck in the other.

When you visit a duck restaurant in Beijing, it is presumed that you will want an assortment of dishes based on the bird you choose, of which the roasted skin with juliennes of scallions and cucumber folded into a thin-as-air pancake will merely be the starter.

My entire dinner centred around duck, yet it was far from being boring or predictable. The soup was a bland affair, with sections of Chinese cabbage, the better to do justice to the spicy stir-fry with sliced onions, bell-peppers and ginger.

Had I been in Beijing, I would have ordered roasted duck's beak, tea-smoked duck's intestine and congealed duck's blood too.

According to chef Liang, the only factor that prevents the full range of dishes being served is the size of the Indian duck. In Beijing, the standard is a bird weighing two-and-a-half kilos; French Farm birds are far smaller.