Gift Guide: Give Them the Bird

If you love duck - and who doesn't? - you're not in much luck.  The tiny wild teal ducks hunters shoot in the fall cannot legally be sold, so unless you know a hunter, you'll never have a chance to taste how delicious they are. The ducks available in most shops today are mostly Moulards, a domestic hybrid of Pekin and muscovy ducks; the truth is that these are raised mostly to make foie gras.

But if you want a duck with character, you can find them at Heritage Foods USA, which sells ducks raised outdoors in ponds.  At various times they sell the delicious Rouen breed, but at the moment you can buy a duck tasting kit, which gives you two distinctly different breeds. One is a Pekin duck, which was originally brought from China to be the  basis of the Long Island duck industry. The other, a Buff (more correctly called a Buff Orpington), was developed by the William Cook family of Kent, England in the early 1900s. And should you be interested in sending someone a Christmas goose, you can get either an Embden or American Buff in time for the holiday table.