It means: duck shit pâté, and comes under the heading of “things about which I choose to live in denial” (like fecal vomiting).
However, curiosity has finally got the better of me. I saw a report on this in a British newspaper several years ago, and am still not sure if it was a hoax or not. The story is, certain French farmers feed their ducks a special mix of food. The white, smooth paste that comes out of the other end of the duck is harvested, canned, and sold for people to spread on their baguettes.
I will call a probable UL on that one. I’m sure someone extrapolated wildly after hearing what is involved in the making of foie gras.
To be sure, I tried Google.
"fiente de canard" yields three sites. The most informative of which tells us that in Imperial China, droppings from white ducks were believe to be a valid treatment for mineral poisoning.
"pâté de canard" excréments doesn’t bring anything up. (Neither does "pâté d’excréments" canard btw.)
canard excréments conserve returns 54 hits dealing mostly with animal diets - in particular dogs.
canard coprophagie yields, oh God, I guess I was asking for it…
canard excréments cuisine yields a surprising 86 pages. After having read a few, I started feeling not so well and I decided to leave it at that.
If the French web and my own feeble knowledge is any indication, there is no such thing.
I’ll add that in French, canard is also slang for newspaper.
I think that if such a thing existed, I would certainly have heard about it at least once, in some factbook or on the TV, even if it was done only in some remote out-of-the-way village.
No…this is indeed a “canard”…
By the way, “pâté du caca du canard” :
1)Is not grammaticaly correct in french (it should be pate dE…etc…), and obviously so (I mean no native speaker would make this mistake) so if you wrote it as you read it, it isn’t a genuine french name which could have been printed on a label
2)“caca” indeed means “shit” but it’s a word used by and for children, so it’s very unlikely that such a name could a traditionnal name, be given to a product, or printed on a label (assuming for the sake of it that someone would actually want to call a product duck’s shit with the intent to sell it).
[Though concerning 2) you can actually buy “crottin de chevre” which means “goat’s sheet”, but it’s a genuine goat cheese (or so I hope :eek: )]
I was dredging the spelling up from my memory, and my French is very badly remembered from school, so that doesn’t necessarily indicate anything - but the rest of the refutation does.
I agree “caca” is pretty much the same thing as “ka-ka” in English. Anyone truly marketing any such thing would probably use a much more sophisticated and refined euphemism than “poo-poo.”
“Duck Poo-poo Pâté” sounds like something from Mad Magazine.
Oh, God. Now that I read this, I seem to recall some quote from a French aristcrat circa 18th century about using duck excrement for facial treatment, but hinting at something like this. It was in the book End Product. I’ll have to look it up when I get home.
Maybe you are thinking of the French artist that canned his own . . . exrecrement . . . and called it art. There was a story about it recently, as the Tate Gallery (I think) in London recently paid big dollars for a few cans of . . . shit.
I read Unmentionable Cuisine by Calvin Schwabe a while back and I think he would have mentioned it if he had known about it. I don’t own a copy so I can’t say for sure if he did, but I think I would remember it if he did. Lord knows I can’t get the roast suckling puppies and rats-drowned-in-wine out of my head.
Okay, I’m home now (I shoveled 4" of snow off my driveway, and it’s still coming down. Worst travel day of the year. There’s no way I’m going to go into work today, just to turn around when get there), and I’ve got the book. It’s End Product: The First Taboo by Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall (rizen Books, NY, 1977), a weird book that I found at a used book store. It’s entirely devoted to shit. And it’s better than any of the other books on the topic I’ve come across.
Ob pages 23-24 and 28-30 the book reprints (in translation) correspondence between Priness Palatine, the sister-in-law of Louis XIV, and her aunt, Sophie. This is reprinted from Nouvelles Lettres de Madame de Duchesse d"orleans, printed in Paris in 1853. The correspondence, if the translation is true (and the whole thing is not some sort of bizarre hoax) is surprisingly open nd candid downright vulkgar, in fact. The princess, athough sister-in-law to the king and a high muckamuck at the French Court living at Faounainbleau, still has no “shit rooms” on her side of the palace, and is forced to go outdoors. (Is the Pope Catholic? Does the Princess shit in the woods?) She spends the rest of the letter bemaning her fate and saying ho much happier she would be if she didn’t have to shit.
Her aunt castigates her for condemning defecation("…it seems ypou know little about pleasures in general since you ignore the pleasures of shitting."), and talks at length about the positive benefits of shit – it fertilizes the earth, , provides drugs, etc. But she wroites something that seems truly bzarre. I quote:
“Isn’t it also true that on the most refined tables shit is served in stews? Do we not roast the shit of snipes, male and female, larks, and other birds and serve it as appetizers to stimulate the appetite?”
I don’t know. Did they? Either this is for real, or Sabbath and Hall (or the editors of Nouvelle Lettres) pulled off a very detailed ad convincing fraud. (I’m sure no ne ate duck or goose droppings, in any case. Our walkways at work are covered with the haphazard lavings of the migratory Canada Geese, and it’s clear that this conists mostly of mud rom the nearby river-bed. Thi would make for gritty eating even if it hadn’t passed thrugh the digestive tract of a bird beforehand.)
For the sake of accuracy someone ought to point out that it was by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni (although the title is often written in French). I’ll leave it up to the OP to say whether he had it in mind, but it sounds like a bit of a leap to me.
Small birds like larks, snipes, woodcock and other “tweety birds” were and are eaten quite frequently. The French and Italians used to roast theirs plucked but undressed, that is to say, with intestines still inside. Sometimes the intestines were removed after cooking and presented seperately, sometimes left in. The intestines were not cleaned. So yeah, some people ate shit (albeit small amounts ) in 16th century France, and I’m sure some still do. But as for the OP’s confit de merde, that’s a load of you-know-what.
And I’d like to point out that we still eat chitlins in this country, which if not properly cleaned are truly odifereous while cooking. Also, if you’ve ever had shrimp that weren’t devained, then you ate their stomach contents along the course of the alimentary tract. Some is excrement, but probably not much.
Snipe and woodcock are both about a foot long, albeit with long beaks, so it’s debatable that thay’d count as tweety birds, but ortolan are still eaten in France (they’re a type of bunting, so are sparrow-sized). They’re eaten whole - legs, beaks, the lot.
