Duck Tales (from Beijing)

The one culinary experience that seems to demand the time and appetite of every visitor to Beijing is Peking Duck (still routinely referred to this way, despite the reformed Roman spelling and English pronunciation of the capital itself).

The ostensible place of origin is not just Beijing generally but the Bianyifang ('Convenient for Everyone') Restaurant with the startling foundation date of 1416 - remember, this is China.

Most readers will have the idea of Peking Duck, broadly speaking. Here where the dish is ubiquitous, there is a bit more opportunity to delve into the niceties.

To prepare the duck, the carcasse is pumped full of air to encourage separation of the skin from meat. Recent tastes have tended away from traditional fatty ducks to leaner ones, but some fat is necessary for the full flavour and texture of the dish. Glazed - the glaze recipes tend to be one of the points of difference, and claimed superiority, between different restaurants - the duck is then roasted over a fruit-wood fire. Rival vendors will also tout the type and quality of their wood. This, I suspect, is one element where diners elsewhere are often not going to get the same subtleties of flavour. Wood fires are always different, and this is one of those cases where a particular smoke makes its mark. The scale on which the dish is prepared here in Beijing makes that cooking method, and attention to detail such as what fruit wood is used, possible.

The bird is traditionally carved at the table, and always presented with wheat wrappers (closer to thin tortillas than to the 'pancakes' they are often called), spring onion slivers, cucumber sticks and the distinctive dark sweet sauce. The diner assembles the wrap with a mixture of fat and lean meat, the crisp smoky skin, garnishes and sauce. One traditional way to add the sauce is to 'paint' the wrapper with chopsticks, before adding the other components.

A good but unpretentious example is found at Xiaowangfu, or 'Little Wang's Home-Style Restaurant'. As the name implies, this place serves local Beijing cuisine rather than the more refined Mandarin-style. Local food tends to favour wheat over rice, with emphasis on noodles and flat breads, and is characterized by use of aromatic spices and pungent herbs and vegetables. Xiaowangfu's Guanghua Rd site is in an institutional building that might once have been a hostel or hospital, converted now into a maze of rooms for groups of diners to have a measure of privacy.

Other dishes were robustly-flavoured, with more emphasis on basics than finesse. Before the duck we had green beans sauteed with minced pork and garlic, and a fried combination of wheat shreds (neglected duck wrappers?), cabbage and garlic, and fragrant spiced lamb ribs dotted with cumin seeds. The local Yanjing beer works well with it all.

The duck itself came carved, with succulent meat and fat re-covered as though with a suit of armour by the skin, separated into scales or tiles. The smoky flavour of the crisp skin was evident, and the mixture of flavours and textures of the end result unique.