Wild Duck

A Flight through 10,000 Years of Irish food

Imagine a wild duck

Imagine a wild duck, their green head catching the late Mesolithic sun, lifting off from reeds along the River Bann. Mount Sandal, 10,000 years ago, where Ireland’s first known settlement hugged the riverbank.¹

We don’t know what their first dinner was, but we know what was nearby: salmon, eel, bass, hazelnuts, and berries. The bird rises, as it does still, startled by human movement. It circles, lands, feeds and breeds.

Its descendants remain.

It flies through Irish food history, its imaginary wings touching our culinary culture in ways that we fail to follow.

One of our oldest neighbours

The history of wild duck in Ireland is a history of water, hunger, privilege, and hospitality. It touches Mesolithic middens, medieval feasting halls, Anglo-Irish estates, famine scarcity, the sporting culture of landlords, and finally the resurrected interest in wild food and terroir in contemporary restaurants, like my own Aniar on Dominick Street in Galway.

When we serve wild duck we are engaging with the longue durée of this food stuff in Ireland. We are engaging in an ancient culture that takes us back to the first settlers on the island of Ireland.

The duck, common yet elusive, is a quiet witness to Irish food culture. It is a bird that refuses straight domestication and persists in the liminal zone between the wild and the restaurant plate.

Duck bones appear in the archaeological record of Ireland from the beginning in places such as Mount Sandal and Lough Boora’s prehistoric settlement landscapes.2 If salmon, eel and bass, shaped Mesolithic life, duck, as well as other wild birds, supplemented it.

You can imagine the scene:

Fish grilling on spits, hazelnuts cracked open, feathers drifting from a plucked bird. The earliest eating experiences in Ireland were seasonal, opportunistic, and unceremonious, but not without meaning.

Especially for us, looking back.

Meaning is sometimes like this. Signifiance sometimes accrues over time, gathering momentum with tradition and human habit.

We lose wild duck for a while when written records first arrive. Early monastic sources classify foods hierarchically: fish and dairy dominate, swans and geese appear occasionally, but wild ducks scarcely raise a comment. It seems, with the advent of agriculture, people ate less wild birds, except those living on coastal and wetlands.

Wildness remained a necessity for those who lived on coasts and wetlands. They would net everything from swans, geese, ducks, and other seabirds, such as cormorants.

In The Archaeology of Wild Birds in Britain and Ireland (Oxbow Books, 2023), Dale Serjeantson links the returned rise in wild birds to falconry, Christian fasting rules, and the development of monasteries.²

Though birds were not classified as ‘meat’ in Christian Ireland, especially those that resided upon the water. Puffins, like fish, swam and caught their food in the ocean, so obliging popes decreed puffins too could be eaten on fast days because they were classified as ‘fish’ in Christian dietary logic.

So the wild duck could have possibly featured on fast days, a welcome relief to the salted fish and nettle broth.

As Mairtín Mac Con Iomaire reminds us, Irish food history is full of absences. Things eaten every day become invisible because they were unremarkable: “Our food history lies in the folds and crevices as much as in the grand narratives”.3 But an absence of evidence doesn’t mean that they weren’t eaten.

Visible absences

Wild duck belonged to this invisible diet, a diet on records not written and only available through archaeological investigation: silent everyday meals that are lost to history.

By the time of the Normans in Ireland, duck re-enters the food narrative space differently, through aristocratic hunting and culinary sophistication.3 The Anglo-Norman elite hawked or netted them in marshlands; cooks in castles and ‘high status households’ braised them in wine, vinegar, and spices.4 The Gaelic peasantry trapped them less ceremonially, reed snares, hoops, nets, and decoys, roasting them over open fires. Yet, only when they could get access.

In common with the nobility of continental Europe and England, the Anglo-Norman elite sought to restrict access to hunted foods, by limiting hunting rights for many sections of society. This control over who could hunt, and when and where hunting could take place meant that consumption of game became a status symbol for the elite.³

Fast forward a few hundred years and we encounter Lancelot de Casteau’s Ouverture de cuisine (Opening the Kitchen) of 1604, which contains three recipes ‘à la mode d’Irlande’, one of which is a duck dish:

‘Pour accoustrer un canar à la mode d’Irlande’

(To garnish a duck in the Irish style)

Put to boil a good duck, when cooked take malvoisie [a sweet wine], new butter and take radish roots well beaten [mashed]; put sugar and cinnamon therein and bring to boil and cast it on to the duck and serve forth.

From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards wild duck becomes tied to landownership, sport, and hospitality. Shooting lodges in Connemara and Mayo, gentry estates in Wicklow, land agents on the Shannon, mallard becomes a seasonal currency. Middle-class clubs form around estuaries. Estate cookbooks list game birds with reverence, from mallard to teal, to partridge and pheasant. Wild birds are served with brandy and orange, stewed in wine, or dressed with bacon and black pepper. Others appeared with gin, almonds, and lemon.⁴

Dorothy Cashman’s work on Irish household foodways argue that Irish cuisine during those centuries was socially stratified: the aristocratic and landed class had access to imported spices, imported methods, and game birds, while ordinary rural households had simpler, more local, pragmatic cooking traditions, possibly cooking wild duck over peat embers.⁵

Thus, this period of Irish food history is a tale of two ducks: one duck with imported spice, dried fruit and alcohol; the other simply roasted on peat embers, maybe brushed with butter, seaoned with salt and a little wild thyme or heather.

Beyond those Anglo-Irish halls, wild duck remained simply food, caught for sustenance, received in barter, cooked plainly. It bridged the gap between classes.

Neither rare nor mundane

It is a part of history we fail to remember.

The twentieth century almost erases wild duck from the Irish restaurant table. Domesticated breeds, first the Pekin, later the Gressingham hybrid, deliver consistency.

Wild duck, viewed as too gamey, irregular, and seasonal, is displaced by the uniform breast and confit leg of hotel cuisine. In modernising itself, Irish hospitality turned away from wildness, standardising flavour and, in the process, severed itself from its unruly origins. As Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire notes, Irish food culture underwent a kind of culinary amnesia in the 20th century, forgetting its own terroir, privileging refinement over rootedness.

In modernising itself, Irish hospitality estranged itself from the unruly origins of wild flavours.

Yet, the disappearance wasn’t total.

The wild duck persisted in some country houses, gun clubs and rural sporting culture, where many families were reared on wild duck shot in the fields. When writing The Irish Cook Book (2020), I was amazed to speak to so many people who grew up in the same period of Irish history as I did, but who dined on wild duck.

It’s safe to say that I didn’t see a wild duck until I began to cook in my late teens and early twenties. Indeed, it was probably my fascination with St. John in London and Fergus Henderson’s theology of “nose to tail” that initiated my apprenticeship into all things wild.

Eating wild duck there in the late 1990s was my gateway drug to loving game.

Yet the wildness did eventually return to Ireland and to Irish cooking. And this is where our story of the wild duck lands again.

You watch it descend over Lough Corrib, over the River Corrib itself, touching down in Galway Bay, just as thousands of its ancestors did millennia ago. You see it come to rest in the West, at Aniar and other restaurant of the west of Ireland.

A place where the past has been searching for a present in order to create a future of its own.

The duck lands again, startled and startling, on the plate. It's served with beetroot, berries and winter radishes.

What does wild duck mean in contemporary Irish cuisine?

It returns us to origin points: landscape, seasonality, and flavour rooted in time and place. Wild duck tastes of where it has been, across land and sea, across field and bog.

It contains movement and you can almost taste its flight through time.

Cooking wild duck requires reckoning with its past. Unlike domesticated duck, its fat is scant, its breasts smaller, its legs tougher. It must be treated with respect, gently cooked and served rare, its deep colour resembles dusk-dark water.

Blood is part of its vocabulary. The first cut releases iron-rich warmth, a reminder that flavour was never neat.

There is also its symbolic meaning.

Wild duck sits between the known and unknown, cultivated and untamed. It reminds us that Irish cuisine has always been porous. Before beef, butter, or bacon, there was water in the shape of wetlands and rivers.

A Mesolithic lean cuisine, born from necessity and intimacy with landscape. As Mac Con Iomaire and Dorothy Cashman argue, Irish food memory is reconstructive, excavated more than preserved.⁶

As Seamus Heaney says, we dig to know ourselves.

Wild duck is an example of this excavation.

At Aniar now, serving wild duck is an act of continuity as much as invention. It reconnects with early Irish food worlds: shoreline, hunting, and elemental cooking. It becomes of type of place-making: wild duck paired with fermented grains, wild berries, bog myrtle, sea herbs and much, much more, in our winter larder.

Duck as ecology

To imagine the bird flying through millennia is to imagine what has happened to life in Ireland. From taste conditioned by survival, to taste curated and commodified.

Wild duck’s flavour carries that transformation.

But it also resists the transformation.

It is irregular and unpredictable, as diet, age and habitat of the duck affect its flavour.

Some chefs love it

Some chefs fear it.

It defies homogenisation.

It demands attention, prompting questions about our food identity.

Where did this bird come from? What shaped its life? What does it say about this place, now?

Perhaps that is why it matters, not because many people eat it (they don’t), but because it anchors ecological imagination. It reminds us that the Irish diet emerged from unpredictability, and that we are again living through environmental instability. Climate shifts alter wetland habitats, migration timing, recruitment.

Different currents

We may never know the exact moment a Mesolithic hand caught a mallard at Mount Sandal, but we can know what it meant: sustenance, knowledge, and connection.

At Aniar, the serving of wild duck is not so different. We are still trying to understand who we are through what we eat.

What if the bird that lifted into the sky 10,000 years ago is still flying, carrying memory and flavour, arriving at a plate in Galway not as trophy but as message?

Wild duck, at its core, tells a story. That Ireland was a wetland before it was a field.

That hunting preceded farming.

That food can be an archive of the everyday that has disappeared.

That we remain tethered to landscapes we barely acknowledge.

The bird lands.

We prepare it.

We eat it.

In doing so we glimpse our own flight.

Wild duck lives there, in those folds and crevices, in those gaps, reminding us that food is an archive we keep eating. “Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence”.⁷

Savour it your wildness, eat your duck.

Yours in Irish food,

Jp.

8th December, 2025.

1. Woodman, Peter, Ireland’s First Settlers: Time and the Mesolithic (Oxbow Books, 2021).

2. Serjeantson, Dale. The Archaeology of Wild Birds in Britain and Ireland (Oxbow Books, 2023): 99.

3. Ibid: 167.

4. Cavendish, J. Mrs. Cadogan’s Cookbook: Recipes for the Irish R.M. (Stanley Paul/Hutchinson, 1984).

5. Cashman, D. An investigation of Irish culinary history through manuscript cookbooks, with particular reference to the gentry of County Kilkenny (1714-1830). Doctoral thesis. (Dublin Institute of Technology, 2016)

6. Mac Con Iomaire, M. and D. Cashman, “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion”. Petits Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81-101.

7. Ibid: 81.