AKA- Duck with BLOOD Sauce.

Jolene read a review of a French restaurant in Collingswood. Their specialty was pressed duck. Evidently it’s a delicacy that is rarely made anymore outside of Paris. We had to call ahead to order it and it was quite pricey. We both love France and French food. We’ve been to Paris 5x. We love the food and the people.

I never read the menu to see exactly how this duck for two is prepared. That was my first mistake.

The menu is very small and if you have any seafood allergies, this is not the place for you. There is only one or two things on the menu that I could eat due to my seafood allergy. That would be mistake number two.

For our first course , I only had two choices. The first was three kinds of cheese or quail. I ordered the quail and it looked like a very very tiny turkey. It was about the size of my palm. It only took three bites to eat it. It was a little dry but OK.

Then they brought out mushroom duck soup. It was very good , I just wish we got more of it. The entire serving was maybe four spoonfuls. I just had to take a picture it was served on the most bizarre plate. I have never seen a huge plate with such a tiny amount of soup.

This is where things started to get really strange.

The waiter brought the next course, which was a leg and thigh from the duck.

Cool. Then I spotted something on my plate and I wasn’t sure what it was. When I looked a little more closely. I said to Jolene, oh shit I think that’s Foie Gras.

If you don’t know what that is, let me tell you about it. It is a fattened duck liver. Now at first that doesn’t seem all that bad but trust me it is. Foie gras is made by forcing a pipe attached to a funnel down the duck’s or goose’s throat. They force grain down the tube until it develops fatty liver. Then they slaughter it and we eat the fatty liver. It seem to be that it’s mostly fat and very little liver. The process is so cruel that Foie gras is outlawed for animal cruelty in most of Europe. It is also illegal in California. It was illegal in New York State for a while, but somehow the law was repealed. I googled what the process looks like and it is so horrifying I could not watch it and there it was sitting on my plate. It was a slab of fat that was lightly grilled. It was like a huge piece of the white fat that you would trim off a steak. It was greasy and wet and soft and just totally disgusting. The slab of fat was bigger than my iPhone and 3x as thick. I tried eating it but thinking about it being an internal organ covered in white mushy fat was too much for me. I just couldn’t get it down, so I gave mine to Jolene.

She loved it.

I was nauseous.

But wait , things get worse.



The waiter started pushing two large carts out of the kitchen and to our table side. One was a big silver machine with a crank on it and lots of decoration. They told me it was an antique duck press imported from Paris. He cut the remaining duck breasts in half and put them aside. Then he took the bones and the remaining scraps and put them in the bucket in the press.

As the waiter turned the wheel on top, the pressure on the scraps of meat and bones increased until… dark red, thick lumpy blood started to pour out of the spout on the bottom of the press. (The ducks are processed without being bled so there is lots of blood) He drained as much blood as possible from the press. He let it flow into a pitcher. OMG.

I asked the waiter if they were the duck scraps that he put in there. He looked at me with the distain and told me that it’s called the carcass not the scraps. Ok, sorry dude. My Mistake.

I asked the waiter if all that fluid was blood. He corrected me again and told me they called it juice. Not blood. I think I started to annoy him.



He added cognac to the pot of hot blood and set it on fire. Then he poured it over the remaining duck breasts.

Nope.

The blood juice was dark red with lumps that appeared to be clots. OMG.

Nope.

The nausea got worse. I gave Jolene my gourmet dinner.

I ate some bread.

…..and I prayed there would be no more courses.