I’m a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain. I really believe that every American with an affinity for food and cooking owes him a tremendous debt for bringing less than mainstream food to the collective American consciousness. For me, at least, he de-mystified a lot about French bistro food in particular, and (more importantly) he popularized the notion that great cooking is about making anything taste good, and the art is in making traditionally low end food items really really fucking yummy.

This recipe comes from his book Appetites: A Cookbook. I’m not going to re-print the recipe here – I’m pretty sure that would be illegal or at least a violation of copyright laws. Go get the book. I’m going to describe my experience of making the recipe.
This was the final product:’

You can see that the thigh is a bit too browned there – That happened faster than I thought it would, but it was still good.
This is not a beginner recipe, but it’s not too dificult.
It called for a 4 pound Muscovy duck – no big deal, my local Whole Foods had that. But then it asked me to remove the breast with the wing joint intact. I have no idea what that means. I couldn’t find anything useful googling it either, so I just removed the breast from the bone:

The meat gets rubbed with an herb mixture and refrigerated for a couple of hours. Then the lower quarters get seared and finished in the oven. Then the breasts are cooked at the end after the cabbage.
The cabbage was not difficult. The recipe asks for the cabbage to be cut chiffonade. That’s French for shredded. Maybe not literally (or maybe yes literally – I don’t speak French), but when someone says chiffonade something they mean shred it – you could ask why he didn’t just say shred it. It’s a good question, I guess, but cooking, like everything else, has it’s own vocabulary. Best to learn it, otherwise you’re doing research on your research and you won’t have time to be cooking anything.
Anyhow, shred the damn cabbage.
It gets cooked with onions, bacon, red wine, red wine vinegar, and allspice. Except I didn’t have red wine vinegar. I though I did, but I was wrong.
So I used white wine vinegar (don’t ask me why I had that and not red). It tasted good, so that was okay.
The recipe calls for slab bacon. That can be tough to find – they had it at the Whole Foods this time. If you can find it, it’s worth it. If you can’t you can probably find thick-cut bacon and use that, but slab is better.
I did the cabbage while the thighs were resting. It came out very nicely, in spite of the wrong vinegar.
After the cabbage was done I did the duck breast and then made the pan sauce. Pan sauce is fancy for gravy. It’s a mushroom gravy with pan drippings and chopped up duck tenderloin. I don’t think I cooked it down quite enough, but that’s an easy error to fix next time. It tasted good otherwise.
And there you have it. Anthony Bourdain’s Pan Roasted Duck with Cabbage. Again, not a beginner recipe, but not too difficult. Watch the heat on searing the thighs, double check the red wine vinegar, and be more patient with the pan sauce. Still good though, and worth another pass.
I recommend the book unreservedly – again, that’s Appetites: A Cookbook (https://www.amazon.com/Appetites-Cookbook-Anthony-Bourdain/dp/0062409956/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546229872&sr=8-1&keywords=anthony+bourdain+books) – lots of good stuff in there – I’ll be reviewing his recipe for Bagna Cauda soon, I hope.