Sweet & Savory: Cooking with Fruit

I grew up in a rather eclectic household in England, cooking and eating a kaleidoscope of foods from around the world. The combination of fruit with savory foods was not all that unusual: prosciutto and melon from Italy, roasted pork with apples and prunes from Denmark, game with berries, and all manner of sweet condiments and wine accompanying cheese from England and France.

Eating savory dishes with fruit was not restricted to our kitchen, as the vibrant ethnic food scene in London provided a multitude of opportunities to delve into the foods of North Africa and the Mediterranean basin, such as Moroccan lamb tagines strewn with the sweet tang of apricots; Indian curries scented with mangoes and spices; myriad Thai dishes of meat, poultry and fish in coconut milk; and countless Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Lebanese and Syrian dishes that were festooned with pomegranates, dates and preserved lemons.

It was a riot of flavors, and I thought I had discovered something new. Of course I did nothing of the sort, as this type of sweet and savory cooking has been cultivated for millennia in all parts of the globe.

Centuries ago, cooking fruit in savory dishes was also common practice in Northern Europe. Elizabethan cookery books are full of recipes that pair heavily spiced poultry, game and even fish dishes with fresh and dried fruit. Some of those dishes and pairings have survived the passage of time to become part of a country’s culinary lexicon, such as English mince pies, Italian mostarda di frutta and French canard à l’orange. The latter, the crisp roasted duck with a silky buttery sauce, became an iconic dish epitomizing the essence of gastronomic French cooking.

The famed chef Marie-Antoine Carème prepared it for illustrious heads of state such as the Czar in Russia and the Prince Regent in England. It was a fixture on most traditional French restaurant menus and home cooks slaved over this dish as the showpiece of many a dinner party. My family was no exception.

That dish—canard à l’orange—featured prominently throughout my childhood. My brother and I loved it. On one memorable occasion my mother and a visiting friend (a passionate foodie) from Massachusetts toiled for 72 hours to create a duck à l’orange to end all duck à l’orange.

Here’s the thing, though: I like canard à l’orange. For my brother and me, this dish holds the sweet kind of food memory that people have for a favorite pie at Thanksgiving.

Little did we know that it would be the last roasted duck with oranges that my mother would ever make! Perhaps it was the three types of liqueurs the recipe called for, or the liters of Sauce Espagnole made from reduced brown poultry stock, the required duck trimmings, the special liaisons, the caramel or the zested-juiced-sectioned-julienned-blanched oranges that put the kybosh on her ever wanting to make it again. The elaborate dish was served with much pomp, ceremony and applause the night of the dinner party. People talked about it for months.

The memory of that dish lingered. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for my mother), dishes that become culinary fads fall out of favor—this one was no exception, tumbling so far down the cooks need-to-know repertoire as to be considered old fashioned or, as Gordon Ramsey put it on “Kitchen Nightmares,” “It’s the culinary equivalent of flared trousers.” Ouch.

Here’s the thing, though: I like canard à l’orange. For my brother and me, this dish holds the sweet kind of food memory that people have for a favorite pie at Thanksgiving.

When I started working on my new book, which delves into cooking with fruit in both sweet and savory recipes, it occurred to me that I could resurrect this old family favorite. Oddly, as I started tinkering with the dish, I realized just how much my cooking and tastes had changed over the intervening years living in California.

It’s much leaner, lighter fare, reflective of our Mediterranean climate, and draws from the bounty of the farmers market, with simple preparations and no heavy sauces—so would it work? The result is an homage to the past with freshly roasted citrus and crispy duck. Same flavors, different technique—and you won’t need to spend three days in the kitchen!

My mother came over for dinner and tasted the new dish and smiled. We reminisced about cooking in the old kitchen in London and that whenever she sees our friend from Massachusetts somebody will say, “Remember the day we made that incredible duck!”