December 2011. Quack, Quack, Quail: If you like duck, you're in luck!

New Orleans’ revered Reveillon tradition, an annual adaptation of a 160-year-old custom during the holiday season, started this month in many of the city’s finest restaurants.

Diners can choose a different restaurant every night to explore and revel in special themed menus offered during December. The multi-course dinners showcase timeless culinary creations combined with modern variations executed by gifted local chefs.

Reflecting the city’s Creole heritage, the custom springs from the nineteenth-century practice of fasting and denial preceding Christmas. After Christmas Eve midnight mass at St. Louis Cathedral, families returned home and feasted throughout Christmas morning. The feast was called the “Reveillon,” French for “awakening.”

For New Year’s Eve, the same practice was followed; however, even more festivities and elaborate feasting ensued.

The Reveillon tradition was revived more than twenty-five years ago during the city’s annual holiday festival, now called “Christmas in New Orleans,” and harkens back to an era when meals were prepared from readily available home-grown, farm-raised poultry, pork, livestock, seasonal fruits and vegetables. In addition, local trappers, hunters and fishermen supplied a bounty of wild game, waterfowl, fresh oysters and fish sourced from plentiful fields and waters.

In today’s modern Reveillon environment, restaurateurs are encouraged by festival officials to retain the character of the historic dinners of the mid-1800s, and this year’s bevy of banquets is no exception.

Of the more than forty-one participating restaurants, duck appears on menus more than twenty-five times: in soups, salads, foie gras, boudin, roasted, panéed and many other variations. In some instances, the city’s talented chefs showcase the versatile waterfowl in several dish variations on their menus.

Galatoire’s new executive chef, Michael Sichel, is preparing duck and andouille gumbo, a dish he learned to cook when he moved to Louisiana.

A New Yorker, Sichel joined his fellow Culinary Institute of America (CIA) grad, Tyler Kean, to partner in St. Francisville’s Carriage House about fifteen years ago.

“I had never hunted before and Tyler took me duck hunting,” said Sichel. “I absolutely fell in love with it! I could bring these birds I’d hunted to the table, and that was the first time I ever made duck and andouille gumbo.”

Sichel added that holidays are all about bringing something to the table, whether it’s a prepared dish, seasonal game, a bottle of wine or just some convivial conversation.

A Louisiana native, Chick Subra, La Cote Brasserie’s executive chef at the Renaissance Arts Hotel, is also preparing a duck and andouille gumbo—from his grandmother’s recipe.

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