Home › Sauces, Salads, Pickles and Condiments › Sauce for Fowl
Sauce for Fowl
Put half a pint of veal or chicken broth into a stew-pan, with a wineglassful of port wine, the juice of a lemon and the juice of an orange. Season with pepper and salt, boil for five minutes, pour over the fowls and serve. II. Salads and their Dressing.
THE value of a salad is said to be in the dressing. However this may be, most people like salads; and yet very few know how to prepare them. Salads may be called purely luxuries. They certainly are elegant additions to any table, and most appetizing.
A thin, sharp pan sauce of the old English school: broth, fortified wine and citrus, boiled briefly and poured over roast or boiled fowl. Note that the paragraph beginning "II. Salads and their Dressing" is the start of the next section of the book, not part of the recipe.
- Half a pintAbout one cup if read as a US half-pint, 10 fl oz (1 1/4 cups) if the measure is imperial. Use unsalted or lightly salted stock, since the sauce is seasoned at the end.
- A wineglassfulIn cookbooks of this period a wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz, about a quarter cup. Some writers stretch it to 2 1/2 oz; anywhere in that range works here.
- Which portThe recipe says only "port wine." A young ruby is the easiest choice; the sweetness works against the lemon and orange juice, so a dry red will not substitute directly.
- Five minutes is not a reductionAt a hard boil in a wide pan, five minutes takes off the raw alcohol and little else. Expect a loose, brothy sauce in the style of a gravy rather than a glaze. If you want it to cling, reduce by half instead, which takes 10-15 minutes.
- Add the citrus lateBoth juices lose their brightness with sustained boiling. Boiling the broth and port together, then stirring in the lemon and orange off the heat, gives a livelier result and is closer to what the sauce is for.
- Balance before servingOne whole lemon plus one orange against a cup of broth is assertive. Taste before it goes to the table; a small knob of butter swirled in at the end rounds the acid and gives some body.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for two roast chickens or four to six servings. Serve hot, in a boat, not poured over anything with crisp skin.
Sauces built on port or claret with orange and lemon juice run through English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, where they were served with wildfowl, goose and duck as much as with chicken — the sharpness cuts fat, and before refrigeration it also flattered meat that was well hung. The formula is a direct descendant of the sauces served with venison and game birds, and its closest surviving relative is bigarade or the orange sauce still paired with duck. Its appearance in a general household book shows how thoroughly the pattern had settled into domestic repertoire: no thickening, no roux, just broth and fortified wine boiled together, the ordinary way to make a quick pan sauce.