The whole-duck banquet: from webs to soup

One caveat first: we do not hold a ready-made book of banquet etiquette to cite, and will not invent one. What follows is the running order that the banquet’s tradition and our menu suggest, and the dishes that carry the “whole-duck” label.

Quanjude began as an oven-shop that sold roast duck. To vary the range — and to show it cheated no one, in the words of the old trade — the shop turned the fattier trimmings of the carved duck into shredded duck stir-fried with greens, the carving-plate drippings into a duck-fat egg custard, and the leftover bones into duck-bone soup. This “four ways of eating a duck” brought in many customers and became the seed of the banquet. Other well-known duck houses of the day had already turned into full restaurants with menus of mountain and sea delicacies; because Quanjude made something of its duck dishes, they stood out.

In 1901 Quanjude built a two-storey house, added stir-fried dishes, and began to build on the four-ways idea. Dishes made from duck hearts, livers, tongues and webs entered the menu and were called “whole-duck dishes”; by the years around 1949 there were dozens. Several master cooks from other kitchens joined and brought their own cuisines into duck cooking: Li Xingwu from Dongxinglou, then his pupil Zhang Yongqing; Wu Xingyu from Tonghe Ju, a Shandong-cuisine chef, who in 1946 took Wang Chunlong as his pupil; and from the 1950s Cai Qihou, Wang Xuesheng and Wang Mingli. Together they produced the “whole-duck banquet” that became known far beyond Beijing.

A whole-duck dish is made wholly from duck; a whole-duck banquet is something else: a duck-themed feast, with duck as the thread and other ingredients, many cooking methods and cold, hot and pastry dishes around it, so it can include delicacies from mountain and sea. In Chinese the difference is “every dish has duck in it”, not “every dish is duck”. The banquet draws on twelve parts of the duck — breast, heart, liver, gizzard, intestine, web, wing, blood, tongue, pancreas, kidney and egg — and more than ten methods, among them roasting, stir-frying, deep-frying, braising, steaming, stewing, flash-frying and scorching. Because so much comes from the offal, the cooks had to master ways of removing any off-flavour; the golden-and-silver duck-blood soup, which joins knife skills, the stock-making tradition and the sour-and-peppery seasoning of Shandong cuisine, is one of the hardest.

The classic cold opener is duck web in mustard sauce. The webs are tender, the mustard clears your nose, and the whole dish is savoury and sharp — meant to wake the palate before the roast duck arrives.

The centre of the banquet is the duck carved at the table. Traditionally Quanjude carves a duck into 108 slices, each with skin and meat, arranged so the shape of the duck can still be seen; today a duck usually comes on two plates of about 50 slices each. You can roll it with sauce and scallion, or dip the first slice of skin in sugar on its own. In 2014, at the APEC banquet in Beijing, Quanjude carved its duck a new way, arranging the breast slices as a peony — the origin of our “Prosperous Peony” duck.

The best-known hot dish of the banquet is fire-touched duck hearts. What our printed menu says is that the dish was created at Quanjude, is the best-selling hot dish, and is a famous whole-duck banquet dish. The method is unusual: the hearts are flamed with white liquor, crisp-scorched outside, still tender inside, with a deep liquor aroma. Coriander and scallion go well with it.

A few other hot dishes use the same idea: take another part of the duck and let it be the star. Double-crisp with chilies (duck gizzard and pork tripe) is, by our menu, refreshingly spicy and crunchy-chewy; maoxuewang is hot and numbing; for something gentle, the organic duck eggs scrambled with shrimp are savoury, smooth and delicate — its name means that duck eggs can rival crab.

Duck tongue has its place in the soup. The cuttlefish roe soup is a state-banquet soup: the roe comes from Shandong and was once a tribute food, and the soup is sour, spicy and silky, with milky slices of roe that slide down smoothly.

There is another soup in the tradition, made from what is left. The duck soup is simmered for hours from the carved duck’s bones until it turns milky and rich. We serve it too, from the rack of the duck carved at your table.

The banquet should end with a clean, gentle sweetness and a steady pastry. Our duckling pastries, flaky and layered outside with red-date paste inside, show it well: you begin with one duck and end with a row of little ones.

Today the banquet offers hundreds of dishes, and instead of a fixed menu the cooks suggest a combination to suit the guests. The grandest dishes — duck stuffed with shark’s fin, the three treasures braised, duck-paste abalone boxes — use costly ingredients and fine work and mostly appear at high-end banquets. The dishes diners like best are the classics: fire-touched duck hearts, duck web in mustard sauce, salty duck liver, sesame duck squares and golden-and-silver duck-blood soup; and a lighter touch comes from pastries such as the duckling pastries and duck-shred spring rolls.

Two kinds of recognition should not be confused. In 2008 Quanjude’s whole-duck banquet craft was entered on the intangible-heritage list of Beijing’s Xicheng District — a district-level listing. The national listing the same year, item Ⅷ-167, covers a different craft: Quanjude’s hung-oven roast duck. Because the banquet is so demanding it has been sold only at the three old flagship restaurants (Hepingmen, Wangfujing and Qianmen), while a set of standardised signature dishes from the banquet is offered at every outlet.

What does that mean for Ottawa? This article describes a banquet tradition from Beijing. We are not offering the full whole-duck banquet. On our current printed menu you will find a handful of its classics — fire-touched duck hearts, duck web in mustard sauce and the duckling pastries — and not, for instance, sesame duck squares or the golden-and-silver duck-blood soup. The Ottawa menu is the only list of what we serve.

We keep the reading that Premier Zhou gave of the name: complete without flaw, gathered without scattering, virtue above all. It suits a banquet meant for sharing. The duck is carved so everyone gets skin and meat; the dishes sit at the centre of the table; everyone eats together. The only rule at the table is that the pancake is rolled by yourself, whoever you are.

To order in the spirit of the whole-duck banquet, think of a cold dish, the duck, a hot duck dish, a soup, a vegetable and a sweet. By the time the pastries arrive you will have eaten the duck four ways.