Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

January 21, 1999

Plains Folk: The Well-Dressed Mallard

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The waterfowl bonanza of the 1990s, owing to CRP habitat and the proliferation of potholes on the northern plains, is producing some culinary crises—as in, what to do with buckets of mallards? It's a crisis around my house, at least, and I don't claim to be an expert waterfowler. There are a lot of ducks out there, and they aren't very smart. I know, up and down the plains mallards are considered wary and intelligent, but if you grew up chasing gun-shy greenheads at the southern end of the flyway—Kansas, in my case, not far from Cheyenne Bottoms—then these northern mallards, many of them homegrown, seem to come in two varieties: dumb and dumber.

Fortunately they are great for the table. But given it's been about a generation since ducks were so abundant on the plains, I'm afraid most of them are being badly cooked. Just how should the well-dressed mallard appear for dinner?

Roasted is fine, but most people do a poor job of roasting because they've been reading cookbooks written by people on the coasts who eat divers and never had a good duck to work on. The assumption of most such instruction is that the duck tastes bad and you should do something to sort of suck out the bad taste—like putting some celery and onion inside and then throwing it away.

No, what you want to do is stuff the bird with good stuffing and then eat it. The stuffing is important because wild duck flesh needs the moisture that steams out of the stuffing. Use a moist stuffing. Sauerkraut and apples is a good stuffing for ducks. So is regular bread stuffing, especially with chopped apples and raisins in it.

Or here's an idea—do you have some buffalo berries growing around your place? You'll find that after a hard freeze they are tart and tasty, as well as colorful. Throw a handful of those into the stuffing.

Baste the roasting duck with something fruity. We use red currant syrup.

Just knowing how to roast a duck doesn't solve the whole problem because there are so darned many of them. Here are a couple more alternatives.

Mallard noodle soup is better than chicken noodle. Mallards, unlike chickens, have some taste to them. Just boil the mallard for stock (put some onions and celery or lovage in there), season the broth, add the noodles, and finally add back the duck. Thick homemade noodles are best for this because they hold their own in a broth that has some flavor to it.

I'm saving the best for last—mallard mole. (For folks up north, that's pronounced MO-lay.) Start out by boiling the mallard for stock in about a quart of water; you'll have to turn it over because it won't be covered by the water.

The next part is easy—to the finished stock, add mole paste, which is available in grocery stores that have any Mexican trade. I buy lots of jars of Pedro Lopez mole paste whenever I'm in Topeka and have never had any trouble crossing state lines with it. A little 6-ounce jar does the job for this recipe. Mash the paste up in the broth and bring it to a boil. At this point I also add about a bulb's worth of whole cloves of garlic. And then the mallard meat, cut into bites.

Meanwhile you've been cooking a batch of sopa de fideo, which is the Mexican moral equivalent of angel-hair pasta. Serve the mole on the sopa. Or on rice, but sopa's better. Flour tortillas on the side. No lefse.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136