Braised Duck With Peas

The idea of stewing or braising duck with garden peas as a summertime dish dates back at least to the eighteenth century. In 1769, Elizabeth Raffald gave a recipe for half-roasted duck stewed with “good gravy, a little mint, and three or four sage leaves”; boiled green peas are added as soon as the gravy has thickened. Eliza Acton, seventy-six years later, offers instructions for stewing ducks, then notes that “they may be served with a small portion only of their sauce, laid in a circle, with green peas à la Francaise, heaped high in the center . . .” In her 1879 volume The Cookery Book (later called Margaret Sim’s Cookery), described by a contemporary magazine as being “no unworthy sequel to that of the classical Meg Dodds [sic]”, the Scottish writer Margaret Sim calls for braising the bird “in the usual way” and separately cooking peas with shredded lettuce, green onions, and parsley as a garnish. According to the early twentieth-century restaurant chronicler Lieutenant Colonel Newnham-Davis, Lord Dudley (presumably the thirteenth Baron Dudley, Ferdinando Dudley Henry Lea Smith) considered the dish as one of the possible main courses for a typical British dinner “fit for an emperor,” along with neck of venison and chicken with asparagus. The combination of duck and peas is hardly fashionable today, but the dish is delicious. Recipe courtesy of cookbook The British Table: A New Look at the Traditional Cooking of England, Scotland, and Wales by Colman Andrews. Click here to purchase your own copy.