Duck a la horreur

SO pleased to see Paul Collins' appreciation of Vincent Price's cookbook A Treasury of Great Recipes in today's Slate. I have had the great pleasure of owning a copy of this book for years. Not quite since 1965, when it first was published, but probably since some time in the '80s, when I suppose I picked it up from one of those street hawkers at Cooper Union in New York's East Village. It's a gem and suggest you trawl online second hand booksellers for your very own copy. While Vincent and his wife Mary were true gourmands and the book is a very serious encyclopaedia of recipes from the world's best restaurants, there is a sense of the sardonic running through the pages. Here is part of the chef's own recipe for pressed duck at Paris' famous Tour d'Argent: "The duck used for this recipe must be very young (8 weeks), fattened the last 15 days. They kill this bird by suffocation (strangling) in order to keep all it's blood. (Author's note: This begins to sound as though the Tour d'Argent chef writes my movie scripts!)"