How I Introduced the French to Onion Rings

I was living on a farm in the Dordogne, a poor region of France known for mosquitoes, strawberries and maigret. (Maigret is the duck breast of a duck that has been force-fed corn in order to fatten its liver.) The farm raised cattle for veal, rented out rooms, and, most notably, made the best duck confit on the planet. (Indeed, there was very little on this farm in the way of fowl and swine that was not the best on the planet.) I do not recall the type of duck they raised, but I do recall how it was raised.

Once it could waddle a bit, the duck was slowly raised on a diet of corn grown on the farm. A toothless, ancient old woman who ate all her food with a pocket knife fed the ducks and spoke to them in some special duck-Dordogne dialect that only a handful of people in the village of 50 could understand. I am convinced that whatever she said to them contributed to the quality of the final product, since it calmed their nerves and made them eager to eat corn.

When the ducks got to adult size, about 10 of the best would be selected for liver-fattening. Madame LaForet, the mistress of the farm, would sit on a stool in a room of the barn and skillfully massage the neck of each duck as she slowly fed it corn. It was a labor intensive process, taking several hours of the morning and evening. She was gentle with the animal and never fed it more than it was willing to eat. She despised the "factory" foie gras operations which she considered a form of animal cruelty and a disgrace to a method that had been practiced for centuries in this region.

When the ducks had reached the corn absorption point, a mystical measuring system that no one other than Madame LaForet understood, the ducks were slaughtered. Slaughter day was a big event at the farm, involving both liquor and feathers. The ducks were swiftly killed, and somewhat less swiftly cleaned and quartered. The pieces were then layered in a heavy earthenware jar, several feet deep, with copious quantities of coarse salt. After several days, they were removed, the salt wiped off and the pieces cooked.

The cooking of these noble ducks was something out of a dream. Madame LaForet had an enormous fireplace in her kitchen, probably ten feet wide and dating from the Napoleonic Era. The duck pieces were placed in cast iron cauldrons suspended from hooks in the fireplace and cooked over a low fire for about a day. When the ducks reached a state of consistency that, again, only the science of Madame LaForet understood, they were ready for curing. The curing process was nothing more complicated than placing the duck and more salt in another earthenware jar, filling the jar with the sumptuous, molten fat, and leaving the jar to sit for a couple of months in a cool stone outbuilding. The result was duck confit. This confit has no more in common with the roasted duck shreds littering the salad plates of chic restaurants than a cubic Zerconia has to a diamond.

Once cured, the duck pieces were pan-fried and served with potatoes sauteed in the confit fat. Do not eat this on a diet: you will feel guilty for the rest of your life. The guilt, however, will be worth it.

The downside (quack, quack) of this duck dream was surplus duckfat. One could hardly enter a pantry without tripping over an amphora of the rendered duck fat of her corn-fattened ducks. She had so much of stuff that she used it as hand cream. Therefore, she didn't much mind when I asked if I could use some of it to make onion rings. I made a basic beer batter of dark french beer, a little sweet, cornstarch and flour and used it to fry up some Spanish onions in about a quart of that unparalleled fat. It was well-received by everyone, including the little old lady, who ate hers off the end of her knife. The recipe cannot be reproduced, as Madame LaForet's duck fat is not readily available at your local Whole Foods. The recipe that follows is, at best, its poor cousin.

Mix 75 grams of flour with 50 grams of cornstarch by weight (I have never bothered to convert it, as most scales have a metric option.) Add S & P, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil and 2/3 of a cup of moderately sweet brown ale, (the Smuttynose Winter Ale I am drinking this evening would do just fine). Slice two large Spanish onions into centimeter thick rounds. Fill a saucepan with three cups of rendered chicken or duck fat and one cup of Canola oil and heat until hot but not smoking. (Chicken fat is available frozen in most supermarkets. Lard may be used instead, but the taste will not be the same.) Lightly toss onion in flour to coat and dip in beer batter. Drop into fat, adjust heat upwards slightly and fry until golden. Serve immediately to anyone who does not have a heart condition.