See subject. Little harder in their current state than Audubon.
The top is a Pekin. The bottom is, in Chinatown language, “American.”
The diced meat is from the “American”; the breast on top (lighter) is from the farmed Pekin. (Not bad knifery, right?:))
Not to say that the “American” isn’t farmed. All I know is it’s $10 more ($23), and I was hoping for a slightly more ducky duck. The thing is, occasionally I see ducks marked “Mallards,” others simply “Wild,” so someone, somewhere has taken note. (I’m not sure if it was this store where I saw all four.) And it’s not Moulard, my favorite duck available to non-hunters.
Pretty impossible to say without having seen it unplucked, other than to rule out mostly poorly edible species based on bill shape. There is such a thing as an American Black Duck, but I strongly suspect it just a common variety farm-raised Mallard of some sort. And of course the Pekin duck was bred from mallards in the first place.
Generic “wild” ducks sold as just that I also suspect are usually just wild mallards. Not that there aren’t a number of species of decently edible ducks out there, but usually if they aren’t a mallard they’ll be labeled more specifically as a Gadwall or whatever it is. Generally most duck hunters I’ve known that actually eat them prefer wild mallards that have been eating right ( because diet forms a huge part of the flavor ) to most or all other species anyway.
Wait, I had it backwards! Luckily no-one committed, except Colibri, with a valuable penelopalogical note.
A) I remember I broke down the “American” duck first, because I was so excited to unwrap it first and see what what was inside; B) I used the Pekin breasts for the inlay, the “American” ones went into the rest for the farce; C) I noticed that the “American” one was the more massive one, which surprised me because I always thought that the Pekin (LI, the one we know and love) is the fattiest – which lends further credence to Colibri’s suggestion, that it is a Pekin by another name, because it doesn’t follow the usual “wilder”=leaner equation with fowl; and, most disturbingly, if the preponderance of evidence is to be accepted, then it must be asked: D) whose flayed skin and cloven flesh surround the duck in the bottom photo?
So there are two (at least) types of Pekins floating around? Huh.
Well…the breed does seem to have originated in China :). Mallards themselves are circumpolar in distribution, nothing specifically American about them other than the fact that they do occur naturally here, as they do in China.
Eh? I don’t think that’s what Colibri said. He said that ‘American Pekin Duck’ and ‘Pekin Duck’ are essentially synonyms, not that they are two different critters.
Were they being sold under different names at the same stall, or were they in different stalls? It could be that different vendors might be using different names for the same thing. Besides that, are you sure that all “American” ducks are larger than those sold as “Pekins,” or just the one you bought? If the American one was $10 more, was it being sold for the same price per pound and thus was heavier, or was it more expensive per pound.
Really, we don’t have enough information here to decide whether there is any actual difference between “American” and “Pekin” ducks.
