Duck casserole

What it is

Claypot duck (砂鍋鴨) is a casserole of one whole duck braised in bone broth with a large amount of napa cabbage. Enoki mushrooms, quail eggs and tofu go in as well. After hours over the heat the cabbage turns very soft and, like the tofu, soaks up the broth.

Where it came from

The dish belongs to the old restaurant cooking of Tainan, where a few long-running houses still serve the banquet food of the city's former wine houses (酒家), the entertainment restaurants of an earlier era. Amei (阿美飯店), opened by Tsai Chung-lien (蔡崇廉) more than sixty years ago, made claypot duck one of its two signatures, alongside claypot fish head. Its version is said to come from Fuzhou cooking and was refined over many years. One account claims that at its peak the restaurant sold 900 pots in a single day.

Another line runs through Hsin Hsin (欣欣餐廳). Its chef and the earlier head of A-Hsia (阿霞飯店) were fellow apprentices, and both drew on the cooking of Yi-chuan (一川師) at the old Baomeilou (寶美樓), which mixed wine-house dishes with Fuzhou recipes. Hsin Hsin's menu shrank over the years. Its chef later brought old dishes back, claypot duck among them, as cultural tourism in Tainan picked up.

How it is made

Amei starts with a duck of about 3.5 jin (斤), roughly 2 kg, and about 2.5 jin of napa cabbage. The cabbage goes into big-bone broth first and is braised until soft. The whole duck follows, with garlic, dried flatfish (扁魚) and fried shallots for fragrance, and cooks for about three hours in a cast-iron pot over charcoal, stirred as it goes. The chef, Tsai Hsiu-shan (蔡秀山), says a gas burner cannot give the same aroma.

How to eat it

It is a dish for a table, ordered alongside other banquet plates; at Amei it closes the set banquet menu. Share out the cabbage and tofu with the duck. Because it takes hours to cook, ask about pre-ordering when you book. Some customers come in just to take a pot away.