An Animal’s Essence – Ducky Pasta Sauce

I make a lot of tomato sauces; I could probably write a cookbook solely on variations of the “red sauce” I grew up with in Jersey. I have been awash in duck bits lately, so I thought I would do something that I’ve heard the Gascons do in Southwest France: Make a duck dish where there is no visible duck.

I like the thinking behind this. Essences are all the rage in avante-garde cuisine these days: Thomas Keller does an excellent job elevating traditional methods in his French Laundry cooking, and Grant Achatz achieves similar results with technology. But you need not go through the hoops these chefs demand to create a dish with the essence, the whiff, the near-subliminal feeling of the ingredient you want to highlight: What you need is good stock and clean fat.

Both are distillates of the core flavor of the animal. You can safely use all domestic animals to do the stock-fat two-step, but be sure you do this with quality animals, not factory-farmed crap. You will notice the difference. Wild animals are another matter. Think of it like wine: California vintages do vary, but only slightly so compared to vintages in Europe or the East Coast. Domestic animals are akin to California wine, consistent but rarely reaching the soaring heights of the perfect — or suffering the dismal losses of a terrible year. This is the roulette you play with wild animals.

That mallard you shot could be clean and delicious, but the next one could have been eating mussels and is achingly fishy. It happens. Same with venison. I’ve shot mule deer in Montana whose fat was sharp and unpleasant. I shot a whitetail in Wyoming last year whose fat was so sweet I used all I could get to make sausages without added pork fat; this is unheard of.

Mechanically, you will know which category your animal falls into by slicing off some fat and rendering it slowly in a pan. Smell it. Does it smell clean and ducky? (or however it should, depending on the animal?) Then you are in luck. Does it smell “off?” Then you need to decide if it is just a strong aroma or does it put you off? If it is the latter, label the meat and cook it with strong flavors. You cannot do this spaghetti sauce recipe with stinky fat or stock that smells like someone boiled the cat.

Thankfully, few California ducks and no California pheasants fall into this category. I’ve had a few wild boar that were stank-tastic, but I’ve had others that were as sweet as a Bledsoe hog. You never know until you test.

So I made a gallon of duck stock after the opener, along with nearly a pint of clean duck fat. Both would go into this recipe, which is essentially a standard tomato sauce: garlic, tomato paste, a little wine, crushed tomatoes and an herb du jour. In this case it would be sage, as sage and ducks dance well together. Nature is also thinking about cooling off here in California, and I rarely eat sage until winter.

A final word: Please don’t make this recipe unless you actually have duck fat and duck stock; without them, you won’t notice anything special about this dish. It is a dish for a hunter who has followed my “everything but the quack” suggestions, or for someone who has recently roasted a domestic duck and who’s made stock from the carcass and is wondering what to do with the rendered duck fat from the roasting pan. (You didn’t toss it, did you?)