[Sca-cooks] It's DUCKS ;-)

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Phlip wrote:
>As far as their origin, the information I've been looking up says
>"East Indies".

And the "East Indies" is what is now known as Indonesia.

>Certainly the Balinese ducks look much like mine, the
>difference being  that apparently when the Scots got them they bred
>for specific colors, apparently by cross breeding with mallards?,
>before they got sent over here to the US. Most of the Balinese ducks
>look plain white in the pictures.

To me they look the color i saw when i was in Bali - they are a color 
or colors i saw on the duck page you sent - mostly a light and 
slightly warm brown... kind of the fashion color called "taupe". I 
didn't see any white ducks - and they don't look white to me in the 
photos. Chalk that up, perhaps, to monitor setting differences.

Now, i bought those duck eggs in Jakarta, which is the capital city 
of Indonesia, in Western Java, and called by the Dutch "Batavia" when 
they were colonizing Indonesia in the 17th century. I never saw ducks 
there, although there could well have been some - plenty of wet rice 
fields ("sawah") on Java. The word we use for wet rice fields, 
"paddy", comes from the Malay language (which is spoken in Indonesia 
as well as Malaysia - with some variations), but that word, "padi", 
refers to the rice before it has been husked. Raw processed rice and 
cooked rice are "nasi".

I lived in a purely Indonesian neighborhood in a maze of narrow 
walkways barely wide enough for a betjak (pedi-cab), and there were 
plenty of chickens running around. I rather missed hearing them when 
i came back to the States.

I don't know if ducks on Java look different than the Balinese ducks. 
It's highly possible, since despite the relatively small size of many 
of the islands, each island - and sometimes each region on an island 
- has very specific breeds.

Bali is off the eastern coast of Java, but quite close, and has an 
extremely different culture. The Javanese are, for the most part, 
Muslims, although there remain some pre-Muslim elements in practices 
in some parts of the island, while the religion of Bali, often 
referred to as "Bali Hindu", is not just a form of Hinduism, but a 
blend of indigenous beliefs, Buddhism (which came to Sumatra, Java, 
and Bali fairly early), and Hinduism (which arrived several hundred 
years later)

Indonesia was also known as "the Spice Islands" and was the SOLE 
source of nutmeg, which grew ONLY on ONE of the islands east of the 
Wallace line, and cloves, which also grew ONLY on ONE (or a couple 
closely related) islands. The Dutch came and murdered all the 
inhabitants of the island where nutmeg grew, and many of the people 
on the island where cloves grew, in the mid-17th century so they 
could control those spices, but they didn't remain in control for 
long, and now nutmeg is grown in other places, as are cloves.

Indonesia had long had a trade relationship with China - the cliffs 
of Java had been a major source of bird's nests for Chinese bird nest 
soup, among other flavorings. Then Indians came, bringing first 
Buddhism, then several hundred years later Hinduism, along with their 
trade (they got spices and often left cloth). And finally the Indian 
traders brought Islam, in the 9th century. As is common, in order to 
secure a favored trade relationship, some Indonesian rulers converted 
to the religion of the traders.

Indonesia is important to Medieval Europe because, while for quite 
some time Europeans didn't know it, the Indonesian archipelago was 
often the source of many of the spices used there. True, some of 
these spices could also come from other places, such as India or 
mainland Southeast Asia, but it was long home to ginger, both greater 
and lesser galangal, turmeric, pepper, long pepper, cinnamon - and, 
of course, the only source of cloves and nutmeg/mace.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita