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For the confit:
For the dressing:
To serve:
There was a time when I followed confit recipes to the letter. For those not in the know, it is a method of preserving meat that originated in France in the long, lost era before the invention of fridge-freezers.
The meat — which was commonly poultry, pork or rabbit — would be seasoned and salted, left for a couple of hours and then slowly cooked in a deep bath of duck or goose fat, sometimes pork lard. At this point, it could be sealed in jars and stored for months. Before cooking, the fat would be scraped off and the meat either roasted or added to casseroles, notably the famous south-western French dish, cassoulet.
All quite delicious, but I am not sure why contemporary cooks bother to make it when we can store cooked meat safely in a fridge or freezer before cooking. Pot-roasting meat until it falls away from the bone in small, tender chunks or threads works equally well. It can be adapted to game, using mallard — as for this recipe — pheasant, partridge or wild rabbit. Cooking times vary greatly for game, but essentially do not stop cooking the meat until it is genuinely soft.
The caper and parsley dressing for this simple duck salad is one of my favourites, based on another French classic, gribiche. It has a powerful kick of Dijon mustard and the saltiness of the capers and gherkins, but the eggs add a lovely richness, especially the yolks, which are grated over the top of the salad, mimosa style, to mimic the pretty yellow flowering shrub.
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