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Duck, Braised, with Green Peas
Prepare and cook as for turnips (see the following recipe), using green peas instead of the small slices of turnips. Fry two onions in butter till they are of a pale brown, and boil them to a thick sauce, with some of the gravy from the duck. Season with salt and pepper, and serve with the peas laid under the duck and the gravy poured over. Time, one hour for duck; peas, half an hour. Probable cost, 3s. to 4s. Use one quart of peas.
A short cross-referenced entry that assumes you have just read the braised duck with turnips above it. The method is a straightforward braise: duck cooked slowly in stock, the vegetable cooked apart, an onion sauce built from the braising liquor.
- The hinge: cook the peas separatelyThe entry gives the peas their own time (half an hour) and has them "laid under the duck" at the end, which points to cooking them apart rather than in the pot for the full hour. The turnip recipe it refers back to is not on this page, so the point cannot be settled from the text alone; cooked apart, they stay green rather than collapsing to puree.
- Half an hour for peas is far too longVictorian garden peas were often picked large and starchy, and half an hour was normal. Modern shelled peas, fresh or frozen, need 3 to 6 minutes in salted water. Judge by taste, not by the clock in the original.
- A quart of peasThe recipe does not say whether the quart is measured shelled or in the pod. Read as shelled, a quart is about four cups, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb; read as pods, it yields considerably less. Buy generously and judge by the look of the bed of peas under the bird.
- Duck size and timingThe original gives only "one hour for duck" and no oven, temperature, or bird weight; this is a covered-pan braise over gentle heat. An hour is consistent with a smallish bird, and a larger modern duck of 5 to 6 lb will want longer. Test rather than time: the leg meat should give easily when the point of a knife goes in.
- Skim before you make the sauceDuck throws a great deal of fat into the braising liquor. Let it settle and lift the fat off before reducing the gravy with the browned onions, or the finished sauce will break and taste greasy.
- "Boil them to a thick sauce"Fry the onions slowly to a pale brown, then simmer them in the skimmed gravy until soft and collapsed, perhaps 20 minutes. Cassell's expects them to thicken the sauce by disintegration; push it through a sieve or give it a brief blitz if you want it smooth.
- Probable costThree to four shillings was the price of the whole dish in late-Victorian money, not of any single ingredient. It is a period price marker, of no use as a shopping guide.
- YieldOne duck of this size serves three, or four at a stretch when the peas and sauce are generous. Cassell's gives no number.
Duck with green peas is a long-standing English pairing, associated with the early-summer moment when ducklings and the first garden peas came in together; it appears in English recipe books well before Cassell's and survives in the French kitchen as canard aux petits pois. Braising rather than roasting keeps the liquor, which is turned into the onion sauce instead of being wasted, though the entry says nothing about the age or toughness of the bird. The telegraphic style, sending the reader back to the turnip version for the method, is typical of the dictionary format, in which related recipes are grouped as a family rather than written out in full each time.