Black duck and dumplings is a treasured, traditional dish on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The marshy cousin to chicken and dumplings, this hearty stew is rooted in subsistence hunting and stretching a few ducks to feed a family. In decades past, during the heyday of waterfowling on the Chesapeake Bay, black duck and dumplings simmered on stovetops all up and down the shore on frosty winter evenings. It’s a humble, simple, satisfying meal- black ducks, whole, braised until tender, with onions and dumplings.
We first learned of the dish from Bernard Herman’s excellent “A South You Never Ate.” It’s a charming, wistful book, full of recollections from locals and recipes, both historic and current, for the dishes that make the food of the Eastern Shore so unique. The chapter on black duck and dumplings, the first in the book, sets the tone, and it is a powerful and humorous lesson in the significance of food, memory, and culture.
Black ducks are some of the only ducks we consistently bring home, and so we decided to try to recreate the dish using the oldest dumpling recipe from the book, from Bessie Gunter’s 1889 Housekeeper’s Companion, which was the first Eastern Shore of Virginia cookbook. She calls for one pound of flour, one pound of suet, and two tablespoons of yeast powder, rubbed together and wetted with milk. The dough is rolled out and simmered in the braise liquid from the black ducks.
My first warning that this was probably not going to turn out the way I hoped was when I realized just how much dough I was working with. A pound of flour is a lot of flour. A pound of suet is really no joke. I was rolling dumplings all afternoon, with no end in sight. I dropped them into the simmering broth- it smelled wonderful. But the dish was not quite right for the modern palate. The dumplings fell apart while they simmered, and while the flavor of the braised duck was great, the texture was gluey and greasy from the amount of suet in the dough.
We wanted to attempt this again, so we found a few different, more modern, recipes for “slick” dumplings and set to work. Slick dumplings should sink in the broth, no leaveners, unlike “puff” dumplings that float (the type we use in our goose oh-my-gosh recipe). These slick dumplings are just flour and water, rolled out and sliced like wide noodles, just like the ones I grew up eating in chicken and dumplings.
Simplified dumpling recipe acquired, we had to get a black duck. Most seasons, this wouldn’t be a huge lift. The marshes we hunt hold a small variety of ducks, but they’re predominantly black ducks. However, this season has been unseasonably warm, and we’ve seen a fraction of the number of birds we usually see. With no weather and plenty of water, the ducks have been spread out and hard to pin down.
We got our first taste of winter weather recently. Snowfall and single digit temperatures came in out of nowhere and locked up most of the small water. We didn’t get a big push of new birds, but I was able to go out and hunt a small creek that stayed open and shoot my first (and probably only) black ducks of the season.
I plucked both the birds, saving the gizzards and hearts. All the traditional recipes call for using whole ducks, and while I generally think it’s not the best use of a tasty duck to braise the breasts, I wanted to make this dish as accurately as possible. So the whole bird went into the braise, breasts and all.
This is a very simple dish at its core: braise the whole duck with onions, roll out the dumplings, and cook those in the braise. I deviated from most of the recipes I read by adding carrots, turnips, and some herbs for aromatics. But other than that, this dish is pure black duck. I’m sure every family that made this dish had their own version. I’m sure the next time we make this we’ll change a thing or two, and in time, this dish will evolve into how “we” make black duck and dumplings.
Note: You can make this with another species of duck of course, a mallard would be the next best thing, but I do think this dish deserves to be made with a black duck, shot near the Chesapeake Bay.
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