Audio By Carbonatix
Q: On Saturday, I had something called “duck prosciutto” at a chi-chi wedding; on Sunday, more duck prosciutto showed up during a fancy dinner at the Brown Palace compliments of the chef at the Palace Arms. No matter what you call it, it was delicious — but isn’t prosciutto supposed to be ham?
A: Duck prosciutto is like salmon bacon — a food that exists only in the minds of chefs who hate to call things what they are for fear of not seeming highfalutin enough.
After much consultation with the kitchen, a spokesperson at the Palace Arms explained that duck prosciutto is the breast of a duck that’s been thinly sliced and salt-cured. Which sounds good, but that definition takes a lot of culinary license. Prosciutto, like bacon, refers specifically to pig flesh, and the name is derived from prosciugare — “to dry out” — a process used in Italy for salt-and-air-cured ham. You can’t really have duck prosciutto, because it would be “salt-cured duck ham,” with that ham being (and here I’m quoting Webster’s) “the back of the thigh, the part of the leg behind the knee, or the upper part of a hog’s leg or meat from this, salted, dried, smoked, etc.”
I don’t know about the guys in the Palace Arms kitchen, but I’ve never seen a duck with the legs to pull that off.
