TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's first recipe: Wild duck à la house brick

By James Tapper, Mail on Sunday Showbusiness Reporter
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Taste: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an appetite for wild animals

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has revealed how he developed an appetite for wild animals after killing a duck with a brick when he was a pupil at Eton College.

The River Cottage chef and his best friend Charlie – then both 18 – later roasted the bird with an orange sauce.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today, Fearnley-Whittingstall says: ‘A friend and I used to sneak up under the bridge over the Thames at Windsor to smoke cigarettes and there was often a little parade of ducks going up and down. One day, we took a couple of half bricks in our overcoat pockets thinking we’d nab ourselves a duck supper.’

To their astonishment they successfully hit and killed one. He added: ‘We knew we had to do the right thing then – even if we’d already perhaps done the wrong thing – so we fished it out with a long stick.

‘We cooked up roast Thames duck and a little bit of orange sauce. Of course it was duck à l’orange – what else are you going to cook in 1983?’

Fearnley-Whittingstall has since developed a reputation for cooking everything from rook to squirrel.

He became a star with the River Cottage TV series on Channel 4, in which he had to grow and produce all his food himself.

The chef, 44, said he enjoyed his time at Eton but described the food as ‘grim’. ‘Bacon that really smelt like wet dog, nursery puddings of the most appalling kind, and the worst of the lot was the school trifle.’

He said the one thing he’d miss if he were marooned on an island would be chocolate. ‘I’m a sucker for a Toffee Crisp or a Crunchie.’


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