Roast duck with prune and pancetta stuffing

If you ever find yourself doing a Christmas dinner for just two people, you'll find you could do a lot worse than to roast a duck. It must be the weather and the dark evenings, but I've got a lot of time for some of the more Christmas-tending ingredients at the moment, which is how I came to stuff this bird with prunes, pancetta and allspice, alongside some Savoy cabbage lightly sautéed in bacon fat with chestnuts fried to a crisp on the outside (very easy - use vacuum sealed chestnuts or roast your own, fry them in bacon fat until gold and starting to crisp on the outside, then throw in the cabbage, stirring for a few minutes until it's all wilted and coated with fat), a great mound of mashed potatoes spiked with nutmeg, and a cherry and port gravy. Apologies for the picture quality. I'd been at the port.

If you are feasting, one medium-sized duck split between two people makes a spectacular and plump-making meal. The bird might look big when you buy it, but it'll lose a lot of mass when you roast it and its layers of fat render off. A duck's breasts are also much less muscular than a chicken's, so there will be less meat than you might expect - but you will end up with a nice big jar of duck fat that you can put in the fridge when you've finished, so it's not all bad.

I've stuffed the bird's cavity with a sweet and spicy breadcrumb mixture. It looks a bit dry when you pack it into the duck, but the bird will baste the stuffing with fat and juices as it roasts, and you'll find you have a savoury and tender stuffing at the end of the cooking time. We ate the lot in one go. This is a special meal for a special occasion - but I found that it's also perfect for an ordinary winter's Wednesday night when you're feeling all loved-up.

To serve two, you'll need:

Duck and stuffing
1 medium duck with giblets
100g soft white breadcrumbs
10 soft prunes
10 spring onions
150g pancetta cubes
1½ teaspoons ground allspice
A generous amount of salt

Gravy
Duck giblets
500ml water or good chicken stock
200ml port
200ml cherry juice
1 tablespoon plain flour
1 tablespoon soft butter
A grating of nutmeg
Salt

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Remove the giblets from the inside of the duck along with any poultry fat in the cavity - you can just pull the fat away from the body using your fingers. Use it to make gratons for a cook's treat if you fancy.

Saute the pancetta cubes (use lardons of bacon if you can't find any pancetta) in a dry pan until they have given up their fat and are turning crispy. In a mixing bowl, stir the cooked pancetta, with any fat, into the dry breadcrumbs, and add the raw spring onions, chopped small, with the prunes, quartered, and the allspice. You won't need any salt; there is plenty in the pancetta.

Stuff the mixture into the cavity of the duck, packing it in firmly, and seal the open end. Some sew their ducks up; I like to use a few toothpicks to keep the cavity closed, which is quicker and less messy.

Prick the duck's skin all over with a fork, rub the whole bird with about a tablespoon of salt and put on a rack in a roasting tin. (The rack is there to stop the duck from sitting and cooking in its own fat. If your rack is a very shallow one, be prepared to drain the fat from the bird a couple of times as it cooks.) Put in the hot oven, turning the temperature down to 180°C after 20 minutes. Continue to roast for an additional 35 minutes per kilo (15 minutes per pound). Rest for 15 minutes in a warm place, uncovered, before carving.

While the duck roasts, prepare the gravy. Begin by making a giblet stock (I used a home-made chicken stock as the base for the giblet stock, which might be overkill, but it did taste fantastic) by simmering the giblets very gently in 500ml water or good chicken stock for 1 hour in an open, medium-sized saucepan, skimming off any scum that rises to the top. Strain the resulting stock - it should have reduced by about a quarter.

Add the cherry juice and port to the saucepan, and bring the heat up a bit - it should be chuckling rather than giggling. Reduce the mixture in the pan by about half. When the duck comes out of the oven to rest, mix the flour and butter together until you have a smooth paste, and whisk it into the gravy in the pan over a medium flame. Keep whisking until the gravy becomes thicker and glossy. Grate over some nutmeg and taste for salt and pepper.

The duck will have a crisp skin and a light, savoury spiced stuffing. Slosh the gravy all over your plate and get tucked in.

Cassoulet

No photos of this one, since cassoulet à la Liz, once dished up, turns out to look totally unlovely; and I really don't want to scare you off, because it tastes divine. I hope you made the duck confit (I have cunningly recycled the picture here from that recipe) from a few weeks back, which, along with its fat, forms an important part of this dish. If you didn't, though, you can usually find tins of excellent Castelnaudry confit in good delis in the UK (I've also seen it in Waitrose).

Cassoulet is one of those social-climbing dishes, which began life as a French peasant dish full of preserved meats and dried beans, and now gets sold for vast amounts of money in swish restaurants. You can buy tins of cassoulet, but a cassoulet you have made at home is even better, especially in mouth-feel. It's a wonderfully warming dish, and it's fantastic to serve to friends; somehow it's an especially cheering and convivial thing to eat. You can serve it up as is, or with crusty bread and a salad. I've used Japanese panko breadcrumbs here, which are not at all French. I'm developing a slight addiction to them - wonderfully crisp, with a slightly malty flavour and a perfect balance between absorbency and crustiness, they're terrific for topping baked dishes or making breaded coatings for baked or fried meats. If you can't find any, normal white breadcrumbs, whizzed in your food processor, will be absolutely fine. If you're in France, try to pick up some of the wonderful long, white haricot beans (haricots blancs lingots) which are traditionally used in cassoulet and have an amazingly creamy texture. They're hard to find in the UK, so I have fallen back on standard haricots, which are a shorter bean. They are still excellent in this dish.

Thanks not least to Iris Murdoch (whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which contains a very stressful cassoulet incident, managed singlehandedly to put me off making cassoulet myself for about fifteen years), cassoulet has a bit of a reputation as a complicated, work-intensive dish. It's really not all that bad; most of the work is done by your oven, with you stirring occasionally to help the slow-cooked beans become tender and creamy, and while there are short bursts of frying, skimming and stirring, you can easily fit all the other things you have to do in a day at around the long cooking time. Packed with moist pork belly, fat duck legs and garlicky sausage, this isn't for days when you're worrying about your blood pressure - as always, my philosophy on these things is that the rush of endorphins you get when eating something that tastes this good more than cancels out any health negatives, and hey - I understand beans are good for you.

To serve six, you'll need:

500g haricot beans
2 large onions
2 sticks celery
1 carrot
5 cloves
1 bouquet garni
1 large sprig rosemary
1 large sprig thyme
3 bay leaves
6 fat cloves garlic
1 tablespoon herbes de provence
¼ bottle white wine
4 tomatoes, chopped roughly
400g slab pork belly
3 confit duck leg and thigh joints
6 garlicky sausages (if you can find saussice de Toulouse, they're traditional here, but any very dense, meaty sausage will be good)
Japanese panko breadcrumbs OR bog-standard white breadcrumbs to sprinkle

The night before you want to eat, soak the beans in plenty of cold water. In the morning, drain the beans, discarding the soaking liquid, and put them in your largest casserole dish (you'll need plenty of spare room in there for the cooking liquid, the other ingredients and the eventual swelling of the beans) with the bouquet garni, the rosemary and thyme, one of the onions, halved and studded with the cloves, the carrot, halved lengthways, one stick of the celery, two of the bay leaves and two of the garlic cloves, peeled and left whole. Chop the pork belly, complete with its rind, into 1 inch chunks, and add it to the saucepan. Pour over cold water to cover the contents of the pan by a couple of inches, and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface.

When the pot is boiling, lower the heat to a simmer and put the lid on. Ignore it for an hour and a half while you brown the sausages in a tablespoon of the fat from the confit in a frying pan. Remove them to a plate, and use the sausage pan to fry the remaining onion, garlic and celery stick, chopped finely, until soft, in another large tablespoon of duck fat. Preheat the oven to 180° C.

Remove and discard the herbs and vegetables (except the garlic and the bouquet garni) from the beans mixture and drain and reserve the liquid (now stock) from the casserole dish. Return the beans and pork to the casserole, adding the onion, garlic and celery mixture, the chopped tomatoes, the remaining bay leaves, the sausages and the confit duck legs. (Don't worry about scraping off any fat clinging to the legs - it'll just add to the wonderful texture.) Pour over the wine and add the reserved stock from the pork and beans to just cover the mixture. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring the contents of the casserole to a simmer on the hob and put it in the oven for two hours with the lid on, stirring every half an hour.

When the two hours are up, there should be no visible liquid; the whole cassoulet should have an even, creamy texture. Taste for seasoning - you will probably need to add extra salt. Sprinkle the top of the cassoulet with the panko crumbs or breadcrumbs, and cook for another 20-30 minutes with the lid off, until the crumbs are brown and the cassoulet is bubbling through it in places. Serve up, making sure everyone gets a bit of duck, a bit of sausage, and a bit of pork with their creamy beans and crusty top.

Duck confit

Confit de canard, the French way with duck which is cooked and preserved in its own fat, is unequivocally delicious. French tins of the stuff are scrumptious, and although pricey, not too hard to get hold of. But making your own at home turns out to be surprisingly easy, and it tastes even better than the store-bought variety (the magic is all in the herbs you use to cure the duck before cooking). Making your own also means that even when you've finished eating, you end up with lots of herby, aromatic duck fat to use in potato dishes, or even in another confit.

Because the meat is simmered very gently under duck fat, it remains extremely moist and tender, with a skin that crisps up deliciously at the click of a finger. I like mine served, totally unhealthily, with a great big heap of pommes Sarladais and a dollop of quince jelly. Redcurrant, cherry and the other duck-friendly fruits also work really well to cut through the richness of the confit.

To confit six duck legs (with thigh attached) you'll need:

6 duck leg joints, with thigh
3 heaped teaspoons salt
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
1 tablespoon herbes de Provence
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
Duck fat (enough to completely cover the duck legs when melted in a saucepan)

Crush the bay leaves, thyme, herbes de Provence and peppercorns very thoroughly with the salt in a mortar and pestle, and rub the pieces of duck all over with the mixture. Put the duck in a large bowl and refrigerate for 48 hours to achieve a very mild cure.

When you are ready to cook the duck, heat the oven to 150°C and melt the fat in an oven-proof casserole dish on the hob. Slide the duck into the fat as it liquefies, and when it starts to shudder (not boil), move the casserole to the oven. Cook for two and a half hours, or until the duck is tender.

Spoon the cooked duck and its hot fat into a large sterilised jar or crockpot, making sure that the meat is completely covered by the fat, which will stop oxygen and bacteria getting in. Seal and refrigerate. The duck will keep for a few weeks in the fridge (it is, after all, preserved) - it will also be tender, sweet and moist from being poached in that fat.

It's worth leaving the duck in the fat for a few days before you eat it, in order to allow the flavours to develop. To serve and cook to a crisp, remove the confit from the fat and fry over a medium heat in a saucepan for about 7 minutes per side, with a heavy pan lid weighing the meat down as you fry.

Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

The French (and, doubtless, the French Canadians) have a term for the thing that happens to your body after a meal like this - it's a crise de foie, or a liver crisis. My own liver is palpitating and throbbing, has likely become hardened and greenish in parts and feels as if it's doing its job about as competently as Gordon Brown, but this is a small price to pay for a sublime meal. Even if it's a sublime meal that makes you have to go and lie very still in a darkened room afterwards.

Au Pied de Cochon (536 Duluth Est, Montreal, 514-281-1114) is run by foie gras and fat genius Martin Picard. It's a Montreal institution, always heaving with diners (who are, strangely, quite thin for the most part) - you'll have to book, and book well in advance. This is a menu where you'll find foie gras in almost every dish; where offal and fat are treated with something between respect and worship.

We opened with the home-brewed beer and starters which we thought we had cunningly selected to avoid too much richness before the main course. After all - salads and soups are the thinking person's way to ensure there's room left for pudding, aren't they?

Not here.

Dr W's French Onion Soup was based around a darkly glossy, rich and meaty stock, and came in a bowl large enough to drown a small family in, topped with a battleship-sinking amount of cheese. It was also extremely good, so he drank it all with little thought for saving room for what came next. My own Crispy Pied de Cochon Salad (see the picture at the top of the page) was only a salad in the very loosest sense - fatsome, hot nuggets of pork nestled with walnuts in a salad full of fried onions, roast tomatoes and steaming meat juices, any green leaves wilting gorgeously against the warm ingredients. On top was balanced a deep-fried, breaded square about half the size of a fat paperback book, sprinkled with some fleur du sel. Poked with a fork, it leaked an intensely porky, gelatinous mash of pork hock, made liquid by the heat of the frying. Something in that pork went straight to the self-control centres of my brain and prevented me from stopping eating before the plate was nearly clean.

Starters over, we looked at each other in panic. There was clearly no way in hell we were going to be able to manage our main courses.

Something untranslatable called a Plogue à Champlain arrived for Dr W. It's a pancake. And a thick slice of home-cured bacon. And some crispy potatoes. And a layer of melted cheddar cheese. And a lobe of foie gras. And a ladleful of a rich, sweet duck and maple syrup sauce.

I realise that this sounds like a total abomination. God knows how Picard came up with it - and it doesn't make the slightest sense on paper - cheddar and foie gras? Nonsense. But once this stuff is in your mouth, you'll see exactly why this man is a fruitcakey, cheese-sodden genius. Utterly amazing, completely delicious and approximately 240% bad for you. Between moans of pain from a rapidly distending stomach and imprecations to various deities, Dr W cleaned his plate.

I'd ordered the Duck in a Can. A plate arrived, bearing a large slice of toasted sourdough bread covered with a thick layer of celeriac purée. Next, a waiter with a large, hot can and a tin opener came to the table, unzipped the top of the can and poured the contents over the slice of sourdough with a fabulously meaty schloomping noise. A fat magret de canard, yet more foie gras, some whole garlic cloves and unctuously buttered cabbage, dotted with bits of preserved pork sausage, slipped out in a balsamic glaze - the meat and vegetables aren't preserved in the can, merely cooked in there in a sort of weird sous vide style. (Something of a shame, in that this means you won't be able to buy your own can to take home.) Meat touching the bottom of the can had caramelised into a sticky, heavenly layer of goodness - and I have no idea how cabbage can come to taste so good.

This thing was absolutely enormous. Even if I hadn't consumed nearly my own weight in fatty pork only ten minutes earlier, it's unlikely I could have made much headway into the dish - as it was, for the first time in my life I found myself eating around a foie gras, because all this richness was becoming simply unbearable. My god, though, the aroma coming off this dish was incredible. So much so, that people at the next table turned, asked what it was and immediately ordered one each.

I tried. Really, I tried, but ultimately the terrible groaning noises emanating from my entire digestive system from the gall bladder down did for me, and I ended up leaving more than half of what I'd been served on my plate. I asked Dr W if he fancied a dessert. He looked at me with dull, bilious eyes and whispered, "No. I think I need to lie down. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to walk back to the hotel."

We staggered back to the hotel. Slowly. We lay down. We have nearly recovered. We're going back again on Friday evening.

Roast duck with tarragon creme fraiche sauce

This is probably the worst photo I've ever put on this blog - this duck is out of focus and really ought to have been photographed later, once it was plated up. There's a reason for this - the little guy was smelling so good that the hordes gathered around the table had the duck carved, chewed and well on the way to being digested about fifteen seconds after the shutter closed.

I've mentioned roasting ducks before in relation to collecting the fat for use in potato dishes later. This recipe should ensure you a perfectly crisp, deliciously seasoned and glazed skin, fragrant and toothsome flesh, and plenty of delicious creamy gravy to anoint the meat. A large duck like this (the plate it's sitting on is a giant one) should serve four.

1 large duck
2 spring onions
1 lemon
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground paprika
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon fleur de sel
1 bunch tarragon
1 bunch parsley
250 ml stock (use a good pre-prepared stock or make your own with the bird's giblets)
3 tablespoons crème fraîche
1 tablespoon quince jelly (use redcurrant jelly if you can't find quince)
1 glass white wine
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 ½ teaspoons light soya sauce

Remove the bag of giblets from inside the carcass before you begin, and use the contents to make stock. Take any poultry fat out of the inside of the duck along with any excess skin, and use it to make gratons.

Dry the duck carefully inside and out with kitchen paper. Use a fork to prick the skin all over the bird (this will help excess fat to escape and help the skin to crisp beautifully), and place the halved lemon and the spring onions inside its cavity. Mix the salt and the spices together in a bowl, and rub the skin well with them, keeping a teaspoon of the mixture to one side. Sprinkle any remaining rub inside the bird. Place on a rack in a baking tray in an oven preheated to 200° C (400° F) for 45 minutes per kilogramme plus 15 minutes, basting every half hour with its own fat. (The duck will release a lot of fat; that rack is there to make sure that the bird doesn't sit in the fat and burn.)

Chop the herbs very finely and combine them with the quince jelly in a separate bowl.

To make the sauce, take the stock and bring to a simmer, reducing until flavourful. Stir the cornflour into the cold glass of wine and tip the mixture into the bubbling stock with the crème fraîche and the teaspoon of rubbing mixture you reserved when you prepared the duck. Keep the pan on a low simmer.

Ten minutes before the end of the cooking time, use a teaspoon to 'paint' the uppermost skin of the duck with the jelly and herb mixture and return the bird to the oven. Keep a teaspoon full of the jelly/herb mixture and stir it into the sauce. Taste the sauce and add more jelly or tarragon and salt if you think it needs it.

The duck will be beautifully glazed, its skin crisp and savoury from the spice rub. Rest the bird for five minutes once it comes out of the oven and serve with roast potatoes, a sharp salad to cut the richness of the flesh, and some green vegetables. Remember to decant the fat from the roasting tin into a large jar to keep in the fridge for roasting and frying potatoes.

Gratons de canard - duck scratchings

The UK's most splendid pub snack is, for my money, a lovely salty bag of pork scratchings. These aren't at all like American pork rinds, where the skin from some pork is separated from the fatty meat and baked; the English version uses that fatty layer which, along with the crackling skin, is rendered into a fatty, crunchy, salty mouthful that's perfect with a beer.

When we lived in France, Dr Weasel and I discovered that there's something even better than pork scratchings: duck scratchings. Ducks which are raised for foie gras don't end their usefulness with the sacrifice of their liver. Their plump breasts are sold as magret de canard; their fatty thighs and wings are preserved in confit; and the bits of fat from inside the bird and the trimmings of skin are rendered down for cooking fat. The crispy bits, or gratons, left over from the rendering are sold in some French charcuteries as a snack to accompany drinks. They are light, crisp, puffy and delectably ducksome.

My Dad was cooking a couple of ducks the other day, so we saved the extra skin and the poultry fat from inside the birds to render. The best way to do this is in a frying pan on the hob; baking the gratons will make them cook down unevenly, and may result in some burning.

Cut the pieces of skin and poultry fat from one or more ducks into pieces about an inch square in size. They will shrink dramatically when cooked. Spread out in a single layer in a frying pan and place over a low heat for about an hour, periodically pouring off the liquid fat that renders out. (Save it in a bowl and refrigerate it when you're done; you can use it for making perfectly crisp sautéed or roast potatoes.)

Continue to cook the gratons, turning and draining occasionally, until they are crisp and an even gold colour. Use kitchen paper to absorb any extra fat - your gratons should be dry to the touch and puffily crisp. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm with drinks as a pre-dinner snack.

I'm leaving for America for a few weeks tomorrow morning. I'll try to keep the blog updated, but I'm hoping the wireless provision at the Horizon Casino Resort in Lake Tahoe has improved significantly since last year. I've somehow managed to score a booking at Picasso in Las Vegas too, which is tremendously exciting - watch this space for a review.