What the Duck? Untangling Patos and Marrecos

Although chickens are by far the most-commonly consumed poultry species in Brazil, just like everywhere else, they aren't the only birds that end up gracing the Brazilian dinner table. In certain regions of Brazil, for example, guinea fowl (capote or galinha d'Angola in Portuguese) are highly valued for their it's-chicken-but-it's-not flavor and are an important ingredient in traditional cooking. In fancy restaurants in Brazil's metropolises you can sometimes find squab (pombo) on the menu. Goose doesn't really have a place in Brazilian kitchens, perhaps because it's fatty richness is a bit overwhelming in tropical heat.

One bird that bridges the gap between traditional, countryside cooking and contemporary gastronomy in Brazil is the duck. Ducks can be found waddling around the simplest homestead in the backland - easy and cheap to raise - and end up roasted or stewed without fuss or muss. At the other end of the spectrum, magret de canard is considered the ne plus ultra of haute cuisine in Brazil, just as in France or the USA.

The Portuguese word for duck is pato (as in Pato Donald, the Brazilian name for Donald Duck). However, in supermarket freezers, in the pato section, one will often find something that looks an awful lot like duck but which isn't labelled pato. Instead, it's called marreco. If you ask the clerk or the market's butcher what the difference is, he or she is likely to say there isn't any - that pato and marreco are the same thing. Asking Brazilian friends the same question will get you the same response.

But, as Flavors of Brazil has found out, patos and marrecos aren't the same thing, though they are very similar. Since Brazilians are as confused as anyone about what distinguishes these two species, there are numerous attempts at disambiguation (that favorite Wikipedia word) of these two birds on Brazilian food and wine websites, in blogs and in Portuguese dictionaries. The majority opinion, which isn't a 100% consensus, is that, in the culinary sense, pato refers to the larger, white farmyard duck, the one known as a Peking Duck, and marreco is a smaller, more compact, brightly colored bird, often identified as the bird English speakers call teal.

Pato

Marreco

In the kitchen, pato is considered to be fattier than marreco, and with a milder flavor. Marreco has a slightly gamier, wilder flavor and appeals to those who want a leaner bird. But Brazilians tend to use both meats interchangeably and Brazilian cookbooks will tell you that you can substitute one for the other in almost any recipe. We'll publish a couple of traditional Brazilian recipes for duck (or teal if you can find it) in upcoming posts on Flavors of Brazil.

RECIPE - Tropical Roast Chicken with Passion Fruit Sauce (Chester Tropical com Molho de Maracujá)

Ana Maria Braga

This recipe comes to Flavors of Brazil courtesy of Ana Maria Braga, one of Brazil's most popular daytime TV hosts and the closest thing to Martha Stewart that Brazil has produced. The recipe is for a roasted Chester (click here to find out who/what Chester is) in a sweet-and-sour passion fruit glaze. Though you'll be unlikely to source a Chester to make this exact recipe, it certainly is equally suited to a large roasting chicken, which is what a Chester is after all.
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RECIPE - Tropical Roast Chicken with Passion Fruit Sauce (Chester Tropical com Molho de Maracujá)

For bird:
1 large roasting chicken (or Chester), thawed if frozen
3 Tbsp fresh rosemary leaves, crushed
1 tsp powdered cinnamon
4 Tbsp soy sauce
1 cup passion fruit juice (fresh or from concentrate)
1 cup water
2 Tbsp melted butter
1 Tbsp corn syrup
4 Tbsp toasted sesame seeds

For gravy:
Pan juices from roast
2 Tbsp cornstarch
1/2 cup passion fruit juice
salt and pepper to taste
seeds of one passion fruit (optional)
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Begin 12 to 24 hours prior to roasting bird. In a small bowl, combine the rosemary, cinnamon, soy sauce and passion fruit juice and blend well. Put the bird in a large zip-loc bag, pour the marinade mixture over, press out excess air and seal the bag. Marinade the bird in the refrigerator, turning the bag over once or twice during this time.

Take the bird out of the refrigerator about 1/2 hour before beginning to roast it. Preheat oven to 375F (190C). Put the bird in a large roasting pan, pour the marinade over and around it, and brush the skin of the bird with the melted butter. Put the bird in the oven and roast it, basting from time to time with pan juices. Roast for about 20 minutes per pound, or until the internal temperature reaches 165F (75C). Remove from oven and let stand for 15 minutes, loosely covered with aluminum foil.

Meanwhile, make the gravy. Stir the cornstarch into the passion fruit juice. Heat the juices remaining in the roasting pan, using a wooden spoon to scrape up solid bits. Add the passion fruit juice, and bring all to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until the gravy has thickened. Season with salt and pepper and add passion fruit seeds if desired.

Serve the bird whole to be carved at the table, and pass the gravy separately.

Who (or What) is Chester?

One of the centerpieces of the Brazilian buffet table, especially at Christmas, is  often a poultry roast looking a bit like an overgrown chicken, labelled "Chester." It's roasted, sliced and served like a turkey, though the taste is closer to chicken than it is to turkey. You can also find whole Chesters in Brazilian supermarket freezers wedged between smaller frozen chickens on one side and frozen turkeys on the other.

Chester is clearly not a Portuguese word, and if you ask Brazilians what a Chester is (and we have), the answer usually is something like "Well, it's a Chester." Because of the visibility of Chesters at this time of year, clearly a bit of gastronomic sleuthing was in order. Flavors of Brazil has decided to get to the bottom of the whole Chester mystery because most of the Brazilian public doesn't seem to know what one really is.

Chesters

 

It turns out, after minimal research on our part, that the word Chester is trademarked in Brazil by a large meat-packing and poultry firm called Perdigão. If it's a Chester, then it's a  Perdigão product. According to company website and to an article in the Portuguese language Wikipedia site, in the late 1970s Perdigão began an international search for a variety of chicken that could be marketed as a roasting chicken with a high percentage of breast and thigh - one that was just the right size for a typical Brazilian family of 4.5 persons. During their international search, the firm's aviculture technicians found a hybrid cross of chickens that fit their requirements at a US firm called Cobb Vantress. Geneticists at Cobb Vantress, using a natural genetic line from Scotland as their base, had developed a variety of chicken that produced a roasting chicken which yielded up to 70% breast and thigh meat, just what Perdigão wanted. Perdigão bought the rights to this cross and began raising the birds in Brazil in the early 1980s.

In 1982 Perdigão launched the Chester nationally in Brazil. They chose the name Chester, apparently, because the marketing department wanted to emphasize the large amount of breast meat (or chest meat if you will) that the bird delivered, and probably decided that Chester sounded better than Breaster. The Chester brand was an immediate success, and is today still one of Perdigão's most prestigious brands.

Because the genetic line of the bird is patented in the USA and Perdigão has exclusive rights to it in Brazil, all Chesters raised in Brazil are delivered to Perdigão for marketing and sales. In order to protect their investment in the Chester, sale or distribution of eggs is prohibited.

All Chesters are raised on a 100% natural grain diet, principally corn and soya. They are fed no animal byproducts. They are non-medicated; that is, they are not given antibiotics, growth hormones or steroids to increase the speed of their growth or to increase their weight. Their larger size is strictly due to genetics.

Christmas is by far the largest season for Chester sales in Brazil, just as it is for turkey. But Chesters are available year-round, frozen. In addition to the Brazilian market, Perdigão now exports Chesters to 25 countries around the world.

We've eaten Chester and liked it, and have roasted it at home. It's medium size makes it more practicable than roasting a large turkey in a small Brazilian oven, and if properly roasted the bird is juicy, flavorful and tender. And Chesters do seem to be particularly "busty" - there's a lot of breast meat in comparison to other parts of the bird. If we were to market the Chester in the USA, we wouldn't call it a Chester at all - it would be a Dolly. Named after Dolly Parton, of course.

Thanksgiving Turkey - Peru do Dia de Ação de Graças

Flavors of Brazil wishes our American readers a very happy "turkey day" today, and a great long weekend.

Although Thanksgiving isn't a holiday that's celebrated in Brazil, most Brazilians are familiar with the day and with the American tradition of eating turkey. (Not to worry, Brazil has plenty of statutory holidays, so the country is not suffering by missing one!) And Brazilians are certainly familiar with the traditional main course for the Thanksgiving feast - roast turkey.

Eating turkey is associated with holidays here in Brazil too, primarily with Christmas (Natal). I would guess that it's the size of a roast turkey that first linked it to large feasts and holiday celebrations, but the connection seems to be universal. Although it's not clear whether turkey was, in fact, served at the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, the bird is one of the many culinary gifts of the New World, as it comes originally from Mexico and North America, and was eaten throughout the Americas before the arrival of Europeans in 1492.

The Portuguese word for the turkey is peru (just like the country). In 16th century Portugal, when turkeys were first brought to Europe, there was some confusion as to exactly where in the Americas they originated, and they were named after the Spanish colony of Peru. It's very interesting that the word for this bird in at least three languages, English, French and Portuguese, comes from its supposed country of origin and that none of these languages gets it right.

Portuguese certainly has it wrong with peru. In French, the word is dinde, which is a shortened form of poulet d'inde (meaning "chicken from India"). Wrong again. And of course, the English name, turkey, also points to the wrong country. I'm not a linguistic expert, but I don't think the bird is called "mexico" in any language, which is should be by geographic standards. I don't know if there are other languages in which the common turkey has a toponym, but I'm curious as to other geographical mistakes in naming the animal.

Enjoy your turkey today, or your peru or your dinde or whatever else you choose to call it. And save some leftovers for me.

(PS... I've looked around the internet a bit more since this article was published, and it turns out that in fact other languages have chosen a toponym when naming this bird, and they too get it wrong. In Turkish the word for turkey is hindi and in Hebrew it's hodu. Both of these words mean "India" in the respective tongues.)

POULTRY - Guinea-fowl, from Africa to Brazil

Although human beings have been known to eat almost everything that walks, hops, or squiggles its way across the earth, most animal sources of protein come from three large groups of animals - fish, birds and mammals. Archeological studies show that from earliest days humans have eaten widely from these groups and that our species has always deserved to be called omnivorous.

Among the birds eaten by humans, by any stretch of the imagination the most commonly consumed is the chicken. Today the chicken population of the world outnumbers the human population by about four-to-one, with an estimated 24 billion chickens cohabiting the planet with us humans at any given time. But chickens are not the only birds eaten by humans - ducks, geese, swans, , pheasants, pigeons, even songbirds are all to be found on human dining tables.

In a few very specific places on Earth, a distant cousin of the chicken occupies a place of honor on the human table. It is eaten commonly in Africa, where it originated, in the south of France, in the Caribbean and southern USA, and also in Brazil's Northeastern region. In English, it is usually called guinea-fowl (guinea hen) in reference to its African origins, though other English names abound. In Brazil it is known as galinha d'Angola (Angolan hen), galinha-do-mato (forest hen), capote (caped), guiné (Guinea) or pintada (dotted).

These strange-but-beautiful birds come originally from tropical Africa, and are well-acclimatized to hot weather. They are not a cold-climate bird, though they can be successfully raised anywhere in North America or Europe as long as they have some protection against cold. They are slightly larger than a chicken, weighing up to 1.5 kg (3.5 lbs) at full weight.

In Brazil's northeast, where this bird is called a capote, it is highly valued as an eating bird, and is often used as a centerpiece of a family or holiday celebration, much as a turkey is used in North America. It can be roasted, stewed, or fried, and with an allowance for additional cooking time, it can be substituted for chicken in almost any recipe. It's flavor is richer than a chicken, with a slightly higher fat content, although not nearly so much as in a duck or goose. Some people consider it to have a slightly gamy taste, although others don't notice this at all.

I have seen guinea-fowl for sale at poultry shops and farmers markets in Canada and the USA. It's worth searching out for a different take on the taste of chicken. In the next post on Flavors of Brazil, I'll provide a traditional recipe from northeastern Brazil for guinea-fowl with rice, but one needn't feel restricted to recipes that are specifically for this bird. Just adapt your favorite chicken recipe for guinea-fowl for an exotic and delicious variation.