Food historians tell us the practice of pairing of citrus fruits with fatty meat is thousands of years old, likely originating in the Middle East. Examples are found in many cultures and cuisines. The acid in the fruit countacts the fat in the meat, making the dish more enjoyable and digestible. Think: pork & applesauce; goose & cherry sauce, fish & lemon, and duck a l'orange. About oranges.
Ducks have been consumed by humans from prehistoric times forward. They are native to most continents. Recipes evolved according to local taste. Historic notes on European duck cookery are appended to the end of this article. Bitter oranges were introduced, via Spain, in the early middle ages.
As the name suggests, Duck a l'Orange, likely originated in France. Our sources do not specific a particular region/city claiming to be the locus of origin. The Rouen, the center of French duck domestication, is a possibility. On the other hand? 19th century French recipes sometimes specify wild, not domestic, birds. Grand masters of classic French cuisine roasted ducks, noting the practice was revived from earlier times. La Varenne [1651] does not offer a recipe for Duck a l'Orange in his Cuisiner Francois. His duck is graced with a spicy pepper sauce. The earliest French recipes we find conbining ducks and oranges were published in the 19th century.
"From antiquity to our own day, in Europe and elsewhere...a number of such erudite gastronomic revolutions have taken place, the two most important of which, at least insofar as European cuisine is concerned, occurred at the beginning of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. As we shall see, certain of these revolutions even represented an unwitting step backward: thus the alliance of sweet and salt, of meat and fruit (duck with peaches for instance), which today is regarded as an eccentric specialty of certain restaurants, was the rule in the Middle Ages and held sway down to the end of the seventeenth century: almost all recipes for meat up to that time contain sugar."
---Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, Jean-Francois Revel, translated by Helen R. Lane [Doubleday:Garden City NY] 1982 (p. 19-20)
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Anyway, it didn't go to the bone, so I expect it will heal quickly. The only inconvenience is the corner of the nail catches fabric.
