Duck eggs fell out of fashion just after the Second World War when a health scare connected eating duck eggs with outbreaks of salmonella poisoning. The evidence seemed a little thin, but the connection in the public consciousness took hold, and demand for duck eggs plummeted.  The mass producers ignored ducks in favour of the [...]

La Grillade is a typical French restaurant, just like the places you’d find in any sizable French town. Except it’s in Leeds. That makes it special. The restaurant is housed in the basement of a Victorian terrace, and looks uninspiring from the outside. Down the stairs, it’s a different world, a series of small dining [...]

A ‘ballotine‘ is a piece of meat that has been taken off the bone, rolled, stuffed and trussed to make a neat parcel of easily roasted meat. This ballotine involved a wild mallard duck, one of the smaller breeds, stuffed with a boned out partridge, which was in turn stuffed with an apricot and walnut [...]

An old method of preserving meat is to cook it slowly in fat, then leave it so that when the fat sets, the meat is entirely encased in it. Any type of meat can be cooked and preserved in this way, but the method is particularly suited to poultry, and especially to duck.To make confit [...]