Spinning the Goose

My paternal grand parents loved to eat “Peking” duck, so I was told. As late as 1958 in Beijing my cousins would tell the story of the two of them packing off to a duck restaurant somewhere in Beijing on a pedicab and come home with leftovers for another day. My grandmother apparently loved that “Peking” duck and she, according to everyone who knows the “Suns”, was a legendary cook. My grandmother’s cooking shall be the topic of another story some other time, I promise. But all of us have lived the lore of her cooking, and eating, as far as I can remember. The topic of this discussion is about birds that could swim and (for the most part) fly and are very good to eat. Through some odd and fortunate coincidences, I have managed to discover some cross-cultural similarities in the way these birds are cooked, in places one would never imagine anything being the same.

When I was a youngster in Taiwan my maternal grandfather also loved to eat the “Peking” duck except he seldom took his wife with him. Usually, he went with his friends and me, the lonely grandchild, in tow. Even today, I remember what an event it was whenever we had the “Peking” duck. What I loved about the ducks then was the fact they were not fat and you actually tasted the duck meat without having to chew on the fat; sort of speak. Let me try my best to describe that “Peking” duck dinners of my yester years.

Each time when you eat the roasted “Peking” duck, I always remembered the sense of anticipation before you actually get to the duck restaurant. First, you have to decide whether you should have a two, three or four course duck dinners. The two-courses duck dinner normally comes with the sliced duck skin and then have the meat cooked in a different way; or, have the sliced skin with the meat still attached and then have this “duck carcass-bean curd-cabbage-vermicelli” soup. I always remembered the “Peking” duck skin of those years to be thinner and crispier (perhaps in those days the ducks were fed with less chemicals and were leaner because of it). Place on a steaming pancake with some dark soybean paste and thinly slice white scallion is barely on this side of being heavenly. The texture of the hot steamed pancake, with the slightly sweet bean paste and the pungent scallion on top of the just sliced duck skin was, and still is, an unforgettable experience.

The sliced duck skin, then, was never eaten with cucumbers as it is everywhere served today. And that soup of duck carcass, bean curd, white cabbage and vermicelli is something you very much look forward to after such a greasy meal and it’s real comfort food to be had.

The three-course duck dinner is to have both the skin (with the steam pancakes) and the soup, but the duck meat is shredded and stir-fried with bean sprouts and shredded scallion in a light soy sauce. But the crowning event in eating this “Peking” duck is the four-course duck dinner. I don’t know if anyone remembers this “Sulfur Egg” dish that comes with the roast duck dinner from years past. It was truly amazing. The texture of this egg dish actually resembled sulfur when presented and is cooked with the yolks of duck eggs and the dripped fat from the roast duck. For anyone with any hint of heart trouble or cholesterol difficulties, the thought of eating this dish may prompt you to visit a cardiologist directly. And if you have seen sulfur in its pure state, this dish looks exactly like that. I have never liked eating fat but this “sulfur” dish was very amazing. It wasn’t so much the flavors that would linger in my memory, it was the total presentation of the dish and that association with “sulfur” made it totally unforgettable.

After I left that island called Formosa in the early 60’s, I packed my belongings and the memory of foods of my youth and went to live with an aunt in San Francisco. And for many more years after that it was not very often I had the chance to eat “Peking” duck and especially, never again that “sulfur egg” dish came with that four-course “Peking” duck dinner. It was in the spring of 1978, I packed up my belongs again and went up the coast of James Bay, as a budding anthropologist, to live among the Eastern Cree in a place called Paint Hills (now re-named Weminji), in the Province of Quebec. It was the time during the construction of the James Bay Hydro Electric Project when much of the traditional trap-lines the Cree depended on for existence were being flooded. I went to live with the Cree in order to study their traditional culture and collected personal history and stories from elder Cree’s. The stories I collected are now archived in the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa.

During the eleven months spent in total among the Cree, about half the time I stayed with them in hunting camps and on trap-lines where the entire family moves along their family territory following games and the seasons. Where they lived while not in the village of Paint Hills was the traditional “tipi”. To this day this “tipi” thing is an indescribable positive experience for me. If anyone ever has the opportunity to do so should really try it and try it in an authentic manner, no lights, no floorboards and no TV. The construction of the “tipi” can be simply described as a sacred exercise and it is always conducted with reverence and respect to earth and it’s spirits. It is circumspect of the location, direction, accessibility, convenience, visibility and size. To choose the center poles and the laying of all subsequent poles (never with odd number of poles) is the first step. The second step, before the canvass covering goes onto the poles is the construction of the hearth. This hearth is always situated in the center of the tipi. Usually wrapped with sheets of tin, the hearth is laid in a circular manner in the center of the tipi, with wooden steaks pounded into the ground on the outside to keep its circular shape. The inside of the tin is then filled with sand and then later the wood for cooking and heating is placed on top. After the tent covering is placed and the opening adjusted on the top flap, the floor of the tipi is laid with a layer of sand and then covered with a weave of spruce bows. I don’t think I would ever forget the feeling and the smell of first entering into a tipi with that fresh layer of spruce carpet. No matter how cold it is outside, walking into a tipi with a blazing fire in the middle and a soft carpet of new spruce bows is an unforgettable experience; the tipi is so very much the home one would embrace and love, and respect.

Cooking in the tipi is something truly amazing. It is done with such efficiency and ease, one could do it just as easily as turning on a gas stove. From smoking fish and game, to drying clothes, to frying meats, to boiling food and cooking bannock (an Indian version of the Scottish flatbread,) is all done by the very same fire from this hearth. Cooking bannock is particularly worth mentioning because the dough of this thin bread/scone mixture of flour, baking powder, salt, water and lard; wrapped on a stick and the stick is shoved into the ground on an angle toward the fire from the hearth. The stick is then turned when one side of bannock is cooked and the other uncooked side is turn toward the fire. When every side is golden in color and hot, the bannock is done. If you ever get a chance to do this, a freshly made bannock just pulled off the stick is indeed delicious. It is crunchy on the outside and hot and moist on the inside. To me it is definitely in the “good-food” category (except for the lard of course). What is most relevant to this story, however, is the stick with which the bannocks are wrapped and cooked. Here is where the “spinning of the goose” gets started.

Since the very first introduction of the rifle and the shotgun due to the fur trade, the lives of the Cree were forever changed. Being directly under the flight path of many migratory birds such as the Canadian geese and Mallard ducks, the Cree was able to hunt these birds as a major source of protein in the spring and fall. Bows and arrows could get them a few birds prior to the introduction of the guns, but the guns could ensure the Indians of getting migratory birds in quantities as food source. More than once I had heard from hunters about their prowess in hunting geese and the number of geese they brought home seem to increases each time the story was told. Nevertheless, those were interesting stories to hear to an outsider but what interested me was the way the goose is prepared and cooked. Now the tent poles mentioned before also comes into play because by tying the tipi poles with horizontal pieces of wood, a cooking platform is created and the goose is cooked by hanging from these racks above, with the wood fire directly below. The “Peking” duck is prepared and cooked in a very similar fashion.

Similar to “Peking” duck, the Indian (as I have just been told by my daughter Ashley, it is no longer appropriate to refer to Cree as Indians, they are today referred to as “aboriginal people of Canada”,) a goose is trussed both at the neck and at their knees. It is then a line with hooks on either ends is attached to the goose on one end and onto the poles from the cooking platform on the other. The leg truss is hooked first (because the chest meat is thicker to cook) and then the neck when the breast is cooked through. And because the fire is underneath and to one side of the cooking goose, the goose needs to be spun constantly to get an even cooking on all sides (just like the bannock). Here is where the “bannock” stick comes in. An older child is normally employed for this chore where he or she has to sit by the fire and constantly spin the goose during the cooking process. And when the top-end of the goose is cooked, the goose is turned up-side down and hooked onto the neck truss. The duck will continue to be cooked over the fire and spun to until the entire goose is cooked. A cast iron pan is place directly underneath the goose on the edge of the fire in order to catch the goose fat dripping from above. Looking back, I should have told the Cree about that “sulfur” dish I remembered from my “Peking” duck days. But then again, the Cree would not be able to get eggs in the bush.

To me, geese cooked over the hearth in a tipi were just as memorable as the “Peking” ducks I had as a child. The skin is just as crispy and the meat is very tasty, although different but traditionally over-cooked in our “neuvelle” standards. I wouldn’t describe the meat exactly as tender overall because the geese are migratory birds and they exercise constantly when they fly but the flavor of their meat is extraordinary in taste. The best part for me is that the meat is not dripping with fat, as often is the case with “Peking” duck nowadays. So it seemed I managed to find an almost duck half way around the world in a place that I would never imagine having to cook their goose in a similar fashion to the Chinese. The Cree have often said they prefer the spring goose much more because the spring goose is grain fed during the winter prior to their flight north. The fall goose, they claim, is fed on berries up north and the meat is tainted with the taste of tannin from the berry skins. Whoever said that connoisseurs are products of a so-called “civilized” society. But then again, has anyone ever seen a can of Spam after it is pan-fried, or a sandwich made with days-old bannock & fried Spam?

As wonderful as my memories of the spun goose, other food groups during my life with the Cree may not have been equally memorable. Try to imagine eating extremely dried smoke white fish dipped in cold lard with many days-old bannock on the trap-line or having roasted beaver meat, spun in the same manner as the goose over the hearth. So I was told that each ounce of beaver meat has about three to four hundred calories. Beaver meat I’d say is to be avoided at all times. It could never be in the good-food category. Never mind eating the muskrats, it’s definitely in the bad-food category.

One of the most unforgettable episodes regarding food during my year on the coast of James Bay was one night a DC-3 landed in the village from Val D’or fully loaded with palettes of soft drinks and about a hundred buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was one of the most celebrated feast in the village I could remember during my stay in Paint Hills. All the dogs went crazy over the leftover bones. So.

What did we just say about tradition and modernity?