Duck and Ern Chow

There are many ways of cooking duck in Sarawak. One of them is to cook it in a sambal sauce and then wrapped up in upih (betel nut or coconut) . The duck is the baked in a slow oven.

The Foochows love to cook a whole duck in the red rice wine lees called ern chow. The sourish and sweet lees make the duck soft and very tasty after many hours of slow braising in a kuali. It is so good that it is even a wedding banquet dish in special restaurants.

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My mother would always buy a red faced or serati duck (Foochows call them Chuong Wang) meaning full foreign duck or Muscovy. The duck must be more than 2 kg and several months old so that it does not have any more down or small features. The weight to give the family extra meat to eat.

We had a huge kuali in our old wooden house in Brooke Drive before it was demolished to make way for Takang Building, named after our late father. In that house my mother and grandmother would cook many good dishes for all of us, especially our father who was fond of eating good food. Probably he was a foodie already at that time but the term was not yet introduced then.

Photo by Stephen KK Ling.

Ern chow ark on our table always reminds me of the days my mother and my grandmother patiently twizzing the feathers from the duck , until it was completely clean and ready for cooking. They would spend the whole morning in the ktiching chatting and working!!