Campbells are ducks which were first imported from the UK. They are good layers and are very harder. Their eggs are valued highly, not for making hard boiled eggs or for frying kueh tiau. Their eggs are best for salting.
Many housewives would collect about 20 eggs each week and salt them . Each jar would usually have 20 or so eggs. After 21 days the salted eggs are taken out to be boiled for breakfast or for the evening meal.
After an epidemic of rubella (german measles) or Muai, mothers would look for Chai Ark Moh (mother ducks) to make a nourishing soup for the recovering child. The soup would be slowly steamed or simmered over a low fire. And that would be the only time a girl, for example, would have the whole duck soup for herself!! She would quickly recover her strength. This is one of the acts of love from a Foochow mother for her daughter.
According to TCM, duck soups "Strengthens stomach and kidney, and nourishes lungs."
It is usually very delicious with just a bit of ginger and salt. Nothing else. But wealthier families have been known to prepare duck soup with american ginseng very often.
I am so glad that my mother prepared this duck soup for each and everyone of us children and her grand children too, without fail. I still remember how she went out to the poultry market to buy the mother duck she ordered. In the olden days, mothers were most fearful of Muai. Because if the measles could not complete its whole cycle of infection the child might die, usually due to the high fever which could not come down.
I remember how she defeathered the duck slowly at home, just to save the extra dollar she needed to pay for the dressing of the duck.
May God bless her soul.
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