Palaugaaq

As tradition built it

Palaugaaq

Emma Huntsman, North Slope Borough; related soup credited to Mike Pederson

Ingredients

• 1 duck (qaugak) or goose (niġliq)
• to cover water
• to taste onions
• to taste salt and pepper
• a little flour
• a little milk or water
• optional rice

Method

1. Put the duck or goose in a pot and cover it with water.
2. Boil about half an hour, then lower the heat and simmer several hours, until the meat falls off the bones. Skim it if you like.
3. Add onions, salt and pepper and cook another half hour. Rice can go in with the onions.
4. Stir a little flour into milk or water, stir it into the soup, and cook until it thickens.

Notes

The recipe is Emma Huntsman's, in the North Slope Borough's Traditional Foods Recipes. Mike Pederson's duck or goose soup, in the same collection, fills the pot three quarters with water for 2 ducks or 1 goose, puts 2 cups of chopped onion in at the start, adds rice for the last half hour, does not thicken it, and serves it with Sailor Boy crackers and butter or jam.

What a modern chef changes

Confit duck legs with the traditional flour-and-milk thickening

Method

1. Wild duck, unlike wild goose, is genuinely and legally available in the UK in season, mallard and teal both, so this elevation needs no substitute ingredient, only a change of technique.
2. Confit the duck legs at low temperature in their own rendered fat, mirroring the original's long, slow simmer far more closely than a quick roast would.
3. Reduce the poaching liquor with the aromatics the tradition already specifies: onion, salt, pepper.
4. Thicken it the traditional way, a flour and milk slurry stirred in at the end, rather than with a French-style roux, since the source method's own thickening technique is already sound and does not need replacing.