French duck-crushing device sells for €40k A duck-crushing device pertaining to posh Paris eatery Tour d'Argent has sold at auction for a wallet-draining €40,000. The silver-plated duck press was specifically created for the preparation of the restaurant's signature canard à la presse, and had been expected to attract around €4,000-€6,000 when it went under the hammer …
no Ortolan ...
but sounds quite like cuy chactado (squashed and fried guinea pig, as already featured as a post-pub deathnosh).
Well, is it really, the duck is dead I assume and plucked. Not that I have ever seen one of those but I feel a slight scent of Brit/French love here. And wow for barbaric in the link "duck in blood sauce is an antique, spectacular, barbaric and sophisticated recipe". I would probably rather have that than kidney pie even, assuming it was prepared in a less barbaric way.
For horrendous, have a look at how your sausages are made. Sorry. Hats and coats.
From a brief RTFA, the duck is already dead (and roasted) before it goes into the press, so I don't really see what all the fuss is about wrt this recipe. The finished article looks deeply uninspiring, though, so don't think I'll be bothering. For me, a better use of duck is crispy cooked, with a coating of hoisin and wrapped in a thin pancake with cucumber & spring onion. YMMV, though. If someone wants to pay €70 for half a duck prepared in this way, that's their prerogative.
Yes, the author of the fxcuisine.com article states "It is not a modern recipe, the blood taste is quite strong and frankly, is not the best way to serve duck."
I'm guessing demand for the dish isn't terribly high. The same article mentioned that the restaurant has two such devices, one reserved as a backup in case the one normally used breaks. But if there isn't much call for the dish, then selling one of them makes sense.
> if there isn't much call for the dish, then selling one of them makes sense.
Frankly, if they can get €40k a piece (and they should be able to, as there must have been at least one other bidder willing to go that far), then selling both of them would make sense. They're not to make the much money from selling actual squashed ducks any time soon, even allowing for a sudden surge in demand.
>there must have been at least one other bidder willing to go that far
To get another 40k you'd need at least two other bidders willing to go that far. If there was only one, then at the next auction it will sell for as much as the third bidder was willing to go. Now if the winning bidder wants a pair then the losing bidder might push them to 40K again or he might just have had too much sherry the first time and with a clear mind wouldn't go so far. Auctions are a funny thing, you never can tell until the lot's up there.
Indeed, one of my and Madam Fox's favourites. One should not of course forget the option to roast the cojones off it, rip it to shreds and serve with Chinese pancakes, fine sliced vegetables and your favourite sauces. One of our favourite meals for high days and holy days.
Edit: Sorry old chap, read your post a bit too quickly. Thought you were talking about roasting whole but I now realise that we were talking about the same dish. I.e. Peking duck. We love it!
A couple orders the "Chicken Surprise" at a Chinese restaurant. The waiter brings the meal, served in a lidded pot. Just as the wife is about to serve herself, the lid rises slightly. Two little eyes look around before the lid slams back down.
"Good grief, did you see that?" she asks her husband. He didn't, so she asks him to look in the pot.
Again, the lid rises. He sees two little eyes before it slams down. He calls the waiter over and demands an explanation.
"I made a mistake," says the waiter. "I brought you Peeking Duck."
When my brother was looking for a country pub, one of them did fancy french grub. And they had a duck press. They're sufficiently expensive that it was individually named as part of the fixtures and fittings coming with the lease.
It was the place's signature dish. As I understand it, the waiter brings your roast duck to the table. Carves it, then shoves the carcass in the press. Crushes it, strains the resulting juices, adds a tonne of port, and serves that as the gravy.
I like gravy, but it's not exactly the nicest process that goes into making it. There can be offal, fat, juices from the roasting, other odds and ends, flour... I can't imagine why you'd want to look at it, just before you sit down to eat.
Looks like the Kitten Stomper might fail on prior-art...
A friend once found a quite unroasted but still rather pressed chicken between the wheel of his sidecar and the tarmac. Presenting it at the farm to which he presumed the chicken had belonged, the farmer's wife matter-of-factly pronounced "So, that'll be chicken soup tonight".
The recipe for chicken soup was published in the club newsletter as "Ingredients: one tyre, Metzeler Block K, one chicken (whole), one screwdriver (for removing bits of chicken from tyre)"
Since you can get a new one made for about 4-5k, I presume someone wanted it for it's value of having been the "genuine" device at La Tour d'Argent. It's the same way people will pay a fortune for certain arbitrary sparkly stones, and several fortunes for those that have special stories.
While I do like duck, and blood sauces are quite nice, I'd still probably prefer most of the other stuff on the menu at La Tour d'Argent.
I'd love to try Ortolan, but that's outlawed now.
I've used a French Press in the lab many years ago for extracting cell juice, and I had idly wondered how it got the name. It was a great beast of thing, designed to squish tissue samples down.
I got quite excited reading this story, and I thought that some gourmand biologist had been inspired by a tasty dish of duck to bring this technology into the lab. Sadly, and boringly, the French Press was invented by a guy called Charles French. :(
One of these features in the film Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?. (Trailer)
A number of chefs are killed in ways that are matching their signature dishes, and guess what?
... at Myers Restaurant Supply in Santa Rosa, California. It's bronze, about 150 years old, and well-worn. Cost USD250. Looks pretty much the same as the one in the article. Maybe I should get it silver-plated & sell it to an idiot ... I've only used it several dozen times in the 30 years I've owned it.
I, personally, like the end product. Once in a while. Easy to make at home, and relatively inexpensive when you have a nearly inexhaustible supply of duck ;-)
Ill stick to blending hamsters in my nutri-bullet thankyouverymuch.
Hamsters are less trouble than ducks. Id imagine they flap like a bastard when you try and get them in that there contraption. Chasing them down must be knackering as well. Also I hate pulling feathers out my teeth...theres no such problem with hamsters...just run it through a tea strainer, crack in a couple of raw eggs and you have yourself a breakfast treat that helps you lift weights while you code.
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