Fireworks to mark French cuisine milestone..a must read ! YUM YUM !!!!
 

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydispl...bsection=world Fireworks to mark French cuisine milestone

01.05.2003


PARIS - Select guests gathered at a top Paris restaurant overnight to sample the one millionth duck to be snatched from grassy marshland, carefully strangled and ritually cooked with its own blood.

The legendary Tour d'Argent has been serving up 8-week-old ducklings, reared in the west coast Challans marshes, since 1890, preparing them according to an age-old tradition, and serving each one with a souvenir numbered tag.

Former United States President Theodore Roosevelt ate duck No 33,642 in 1910, Charlie Chaplin guzzled No 253,652 some 45 years later, and celebrities such as Elton John and Nicole Kidman and footballer Ronaldo have sampled more recent birds.

The Tour d'Argent was to uncork some of its finest wines and lay on fireworks above Notre Dame Cathedral, which diners would be able to see from the window as they tuck into the restaurant's one millionth roast "Caneton" (duckling).

"It's a real spectacle," enthused restaurant critic Jean-Luc Petit-Renaud ahead of the feast, which has been reserved for a select 140 aficionados of fine food.

"That's what you go there for. When it's being prepared in front of the tables with Notre Dame in the background, it's like a miniature theatre show.

"One million ducks. It's marvellous, really moving."

The Queen, as a princess, and Japanese Emperor Hirohito have both sampled a Tour d'Argent Caneton, famous for being served in a heady, cognac-laced sauce dosed with blood.

A former owner of the 421-year-old restaurant discovered the method more than a century ago from a chef near Rouen who would buy cheap ducks that had been suffocated on the way to market. He tried the chef's succulent duck dish and was smitten.

At La Tour d'Argent, carcasses of freshly strangled ducks are pressed to extract the blood which is mixed with cognac and port to make a rich, sizzling sauce.

"If, for the chef, each dish is a work of art, for me it's a story unfolding, a face drawing itself, the return of a happy moment," said Claude Terrail, a debonair 85-year-old who inherited La Tour d'Argent from his father in 1947 and will pass it on to his 22-year-old son, Andre, today.

"There is nothing more serious than pleasure," he adds.