Just Ducky

Truly Unusual Soups. What a promising name for a book to be culled for frightening food recipes! Alas, although there really are a lot of unusual recipes, many of them actually sound good. Our featured recipe is not from among those! Can you guess what it is from the picture? Duck Soup, you say? Very close, but no cigar - note the tomato-red broth. Give up? It's Duck Gumbo! Ordinarily, gumbo includes okra, a vegetable that cooks to a snot-like consistency. This one doesn't - but the duck pieces and giblet water together qualify this twist on a traditional cajun dish as a frightening food. The comments in regular parentheses are from cookbook author Lu Lockwood. I love how she orders you to contract out the yuckiest part of the recipe. The grammar and punctuation (or lack thereof) are all hers, too. Maybe she wrote out this recipe after testing recipes from two of her other books - Cooking with Beer and Cooking with Scotch!

DUCK GUMBO
(Very Special)

1 Duck, cut up into small pieces (have butcher chop up duck)
1/4 cup salt and pepper [really, this is what it says!]
1/4 cup flour
1/2 cup bacon drippings
1 large onion, chopped fine
2 large peeled tomatoes, cut up
3 tablespoons of flour
3 cups giblet water

Boil giblets in 4 cups of water to 1/2 hour and set aside.
Season duck pieces and roll each in flour, fry in bacon drippings until tender. About 10 minutes. Remove from pan add onions and tomatoes saute a few minutes.  Add tablespoon of flour and stirring over heat with onions and tomatoes until flour all disappears. Add giblet water and duck, cook over low temperature for 2 hours. Taste for seasoning. Serve over rice.

Truly Unusual Soups, Lu Lockwood, 1977