I’m feeling culinarily nostalgic today so be warned – I shall ramble more than usual.

My family is made up of very distinct individuals, each with their own distinctive tastes and strongly held opinions about what foods they like, what foods they don’t – and in my mother’s case – what foods look best next to each other. Under normal circumstances, there are enough areas of culinary agreement that we each manage to live with the opinions of the others (wrongly held though we might feel they are). But then someone mentions duck.

Yes, you read right – duck. Duck, which I don’t believe anyone in the family actually dislikes but which my mother refuses to make on the basis that making it is a messy process. A stand that is – in my opinion – silly at best, disingenuous at worst.

First of all – there are many ways to prepare duck and when one says duck, one might mean a whole duck or a duck breast. Yes, there is more involved in prepping and cooking a whole duck which might well create a bigger mess than prepping and cooking a duck breast. I don’t recall my father (the one usually requesting the duck – though after many years of being refused this is now just a habit) insisting it be a whole roast duck. What’s so complicated about a duck breast (or two). And even if it were the messiest process known to mankind and destroyer of kitchens through the ages, what has that got to do with my mother?

The whole time I was growing up, the entire time I was at college and throughout my adult life, my father has been the “clean up” crew in the kitchen. In our house the rule was “the cook does not clean” – a carry over from the rules my father grew up with and one my mother was happy to adopt from her in-laws. So while I conceded that roasting a whole duck may be time consuming and created a spattered mess in the oven, I don’t consider it a particular strong reason on which my mother to build her case.

Lately she has added – defensively – that duck is fatty. I usually chime in that this would be a huge problem if anyone was suggesting an all duck all the time diet and would be given more weighty consideration if it weren’t coming from a woman know far and wide for her Mile High Grasshopper Pie.

I don’t know what got me thinking about the whole “duck” issue – it’s not as if Dad has asked for it lately. Maybe that last post planted a seed. If so it took a while to take root. Or maybe, as I say, I was having a moment childhood culinary nostalgia or something. Possibly from having just been up at my parents house for an entire month and spending a considerable part of that month in the kitchen.