A Long Island Moment

Thanksgiving time is upon me and I'm going to cook a bird. Since I'm alone it's going to be a duck. I prefer duck or goose to turkey anyway, and of course I'll be eating it all myself.

This image would normally amount to a boiler plate grocery shot. Along with the bird you see leeks, "lady apples," and chopped-up salmon heads. It was a quick trip into town on a rainy day.

The duck, however, brings on a little tale. When I was a little boy growing up on Long Island, there were duck farms not far to the East of where I lived, in Suffolk County. Long Island ducklings were as famous as Blue Point oysters (also out on the island, as people say in New York). We would cruise past them in my Mom's Dodge Coronet.

This duck was raised in Hamburg, Pennsylvania by Joe Jurgielewicz & Sons. The farm is within range of the Philadelphia market where I snagged my Thanksgiving dinner. No hormones, no nasty chemicals. A happy duck is a tasty duck. Joe's grandfather Bronislaw started raising ducks on Long Island either in 1919 or in 1931, depending on your source. In either case he was the first duck man on the block and is important in the area's history.

I remember hearing of the closing of the Long Island duck farms because of environmental problems. Ducks eat, and ducks poop. Where the poop ends up is a complicated matter. Meanwhile, Polish-American duck farmers marry and have children, who in turn have the grandchildren. Grandson Joe took his Pekin ducks to Pennsylvania and established a farm on 500 environmentally cool acres, where he sells duck-poop fertilizer to other farmers, and dead ducks to guys like me. His relative Benjamin Jurgielewicz stayed on the island and today there are two Jurgielewicz duck farms, in Moriches (on the South Shore) and in Wading River (on the North Shore). Benjamin has been having legal troubles with the poop police through the years.

This Long Island boy cannot slurp down Blue Point oysters on this holiday, nor bake a Long Island cheese pumpkin , nor watch a Grucci firworks show, nor lay a flower on the grave of that heroic Revolutionary War spy Anna Strong, so I'll be biting down on a more-or-less Long Island duck as I pet my cats and think about the people I love.