Think of all of the different uses for your tongue. In no particular order of usefulness: tasting, licking envelopes, cleaning your teeth, talking, getting stuck to icy things, painting, obsequious flattery...the list goes on. Have you ever wondered though, what uses a duck might have for its tongue? Perhaps you haven't. Did you even know that ducks possessed such organs? You probably didn't.
Well then, it's lucky I'm here on hand to tell you that ducks do have tongues and that they taste horrible.
I was in London last week on business (well, not really it just sounds good) and to make a day of it, I thought I'd have a spot of lunch in Chinatown. After a lovely walk through Embankment gardens in bright sunshine, I got to Chinatown and began my quest to find the dingiest place with the best eighties decor in the neighbourhood. As I walked past one row of restaurants, I realised there was a police crime scene happening outside a bookies at the end of the street, complete with police tape and bloodied clothes. I had found my spot! The most authentic looking place on the street was London Jade Garden, so I popped in and got a table for one.
The menu here is great, over 40 items of dim sum which you tick off on a little paper menu thing they give you. The service however is rubbish. Having lived in Spain for a few years, I'm quite used to surly staff and bad manners and I've learned to laugh it off and when you stop taking the whole thing quite so seriously, bad service can actually be very funny. Especially when an tiny, angry Chinese man is thrusting a plate of ducks tongues under your nose.
Once I saw this on the menu, I couldn't resist ordering it. There are plenty of other agricultural by-products on offer, from chicken claws to pig's trotters but the one that jumped out at me was the duck tongue in black bean sauce. I ordered this and some other dim-sum dishes and sat back to wait, listening to the punters sitting nearby complain about the service.
When the food arrived, I was presented with a plate of around 10 duck's tongues in black bean sauce. Never having eaten duck tongue before, I had no idea how to proceed and so picked up one of the tongues in my chopsticks and had a closer look. They are sort of tongue-shaped with a hard bone or piece of cartilage running down the middle. The sauce disguised the colour, but they had been boiled and when I scraped off a bit of the coating, it turned out they were a lustrous and appetizing grey. As is often the case with offal and cast-off bits of animal, it isn't so much the taste that's the problem, rather the texture. The taste was overwhelmingly of the sauce, but there was a hint of weird ducky fishiness underneath the complex blanket of flavours administered by the sauce.
Now to the texture. I would liken it to eating mussels insomuch as you have to scrape the meat off the 'bone' with your teeth. The one thing it reminded me of most though, was eating pig's ears in Madrid. A similarly gelatinous, rubbery quality adhered to a hard piece of cartilage which was pretty awkward to eat.
I'm sure duck tongue is a speciality in China and is probably very popular but I do not recommend ordering this if you see it on a menu anywhere. The other dim-sum dishes I ordered were excellent but next time I have Chinese food, I'll probably just stick to the business end of the duck, shredded and rolled up with plum sauce in some pancakes. Xie xie!
