Chinese roast duck immune to germs?

Press, 10 May 1982, Page 31

Chinese roast duck immune to germs?

By

JOHN HUTCHISON

in San Francisco

San Franciscans take it on faith that their city’s Chinese cooks understand food. No city outside the two Chinas is more renowned for Chinese food than theirs. It came therefore as a shock when state health inspectors in Los Angeles began to fine some Chinese markets and delicatessens for selling roast duck from displays in the open air. The glistening, mahogany-brown ducks have been a delectable fixture of Chinese cuisine since the first coolies brought the roasting technique here during the gold rush. Hanging in rows in every Chinese market, the ducks are almost a trade-

mark of Chinese food shops. The alarm over the rash and ill-informed act in Los Angeles, considered by San Franciscans to be a centre of crude culinary taste, spread immediately to Grant Avenue and Stockton Street here. The inspectors Down There showed a disgraceful misunderstanding of the process with which the duck, cooked on the inside by a stream of hot oil poured through it, roasted on the outside to ineffable crispness, and’then hung up to dry and drain, achieves its flavour and interior succulence. The germs that blow about in California’s balmy atmosphere simply do not thrive on exposed roast duck flesh. Everybody knows that. On pork chops, maybe, or roast turkey, or a ham, but not on

Chinese roast duck. Alert politicians, who know a vital public issue when it steps on them, leaped to the defence of Chinese roast duck, extolling its inheritent wholesomeness and deploring the diligence of the inspectors. Like Scots praising haggis, or Stewart Islanders claiming the muttonbird to be edible, they rallied to the crisis. Not for 4800 years, said one who must have referred to a Mandarin encyclopaedia, has there been an instance of Chinese roast-duck food poisoning. He introduced a bill to exempt Chinese roast duck from the law. The state assembly voted for it unanimously. Its companion house of. lawmakers, the state senate, is expected to follow suit.