The Phenomenon of Peking Duck

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the joys of dining in China is trying local specialties. In Beijing, this includes Peking Duck (I’m not fully clear to what degree residents of Beijing embrace this or if the Peking Duck restaurant is a phenomenon catering to the burgeoning -- mostly Chinese -- tourist masses as the various “Ottoman” restaurants cater to the tourist masses of old Istanbul).

I’ve had Peking Duck a number of times, but our Beijing dinner on Monday evening was unforgettable. We dined at a multi-story restaurant in a narrow alley off of Wangfujing Street, a major pedestrian passage in central Beijing. My Chinese colleague ordered the set Peking Duck meal.

Appetizers

The meal began with appetizers, which included spicy cucumber slices, sweet dates, dried seahorses in chili oil, and several other vegetable- and tofu-based dishes. The appetizer plates also included several forms of duck:  sliced duck gizzard, shredded duck wing, and, perhaps most interestingly, duck feet served with spicy Chinese mustard (the latter was surprisingly untasty without the mustard and surprising tasty with. Go figure. Chinese food is all about harmony).

duck feet with spicy Chinese mustard

After grazing on the appetizers for 20 minutes or so, the pièce de résistance arrived on a cart. The full roasted duck was shown to us, browned to a beautiful, crisp hue, head and all. The server then proceeded to lob off the head before beginning to carve the duck meat off of the bones, being careful to preserve the pieces of crispy skin. The skin of the Peking duck is the special part to be savored, with its crisp and crackly exterior and its slightly nutty and crystal-like interior. This is accomplished by blowing air between the skin and the flesh of the duck before it is roasted. 

The duck being carved

Peking Duck is eaten in three different ways:  first the skin, then the meat, and finally the soup (more on that below). Both the skin and the meat are eaten by taking a Peking duck pancake (a rice pancake about 5 inches in diameter) and placing in the middle a few shreds of sliced scallion and cucumber dipped in hoisin sauce. After this, some duck is dipped in sauce and then the whole thing is carefully rolled with chopsticks. One variation appears to be stuffing the duck and vegetables into a small raised-dough sesame-seed bun. Many, many pancakes were enjoyed around our table that evening, along with several other fish and tofu dishes accompanying the duck.

But this is not the end, nor even the penultimate piece of this elaborate meal. After the duck had been mostly annihilated by our hungry group, we were presented with yet another shrimp dish, celery stir-fried with walnuts, and breaded duck livers in a sweet and sour sauce. The final dish was perhaps the finest of the evening.

The third and final way of eating Peking duck is duck soup. After the server finishes carving the duck, he or she rushes it back to the kitchen where it is boiled at high heat with some cabbage and tofu to make a broth. This is served in tiny bowls together with the bones. Rendering the meat off of the duck neck using chopsticks was one of the more complicated endeavors of my recent life, and I would be lying to say that I accomplished this with complete success and without splashing a bit of broth.

duck soup

As one of my Chinese friends told me, the only way to be sure that a Chinese meal is truly over is when the server brings a plate of fruit. It is melon season in China, and nearly every meal included mounds of fresh, sugar-sweet watermelon.

Sitting around our table on one of our final evenings in China, our group reflected that over the course of nearly ten days, we had rarely seen anything resembling the same dish twice. Such is the sheer variety of Chinese cookery. With the exception of durian-stuffed pastries, which I quietly avoided (that’s another story), I didn’t find a single dish that I didn’t at least appreciate. But it is hard to surpass Peking duck!