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Wild-Fowl Sauce
The following exquisite sauce is applicable to all wild fowl : Take one saltspoon of salt, half to two-thirds saltspoon of cayenne, one dessertspoonful of lemon juice, one dessertspoonful of powdered sugar, two dessertspoonfuls of Harvey sauce, three dessertspoons of port wine, well mixed and heated; score the bird and pour the sauce over it.
A quick pan sauce for duck, goose, teal or any dark-fleshed game bird — closer to a dressing spooned over carved meat than a simmered sauce. The whole thing takes about three minutes once the ingredients are to hand.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The cayenne, then, is roughly an eighth to a sixth of a teaspoon — assertive but not scorching against the sugar and port.
- DessertspoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. So: 2 tsp lemon juice, 2 tsp powdered sugar, 4 tsp Harvey sauce, 2 tbsp port.
- Harvey sauceA commercial English bottled condiment of anchovy, soy, vinegar, garlic and spice, once a common bottled table sauce in Britain and now effectively gone from shops. Worcestershire is the nearest surviving relative and works in the same quantity; a few drops of fish sauce added to it gets closer to the anchovy weight.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Either dissolves here, but caster sugar is the more faithful choice.
- PortA ruby port is right — young, sweet, fruity. Tawny works but reads nuttier and thinner against the cayenne.
- Heat gentlyWarm it only until the sugar dissolves and the mixture steams. Boiling drives off the port's fruit and concentrates the salt and cayenne into something harsh.
- Score the birdCut shallow slashes through the skin into the breast meat so the sauce runs in rather than sliding off. The recipe gives no timing beyond the order of operations: the bird is scored and the hot sauce poured over it.
- YieldAbout a third of a cup, enough for one duck or a brace of small birds. Double it for a goose.
Harvey sauce helps place this recipe: a bottled anchovy-and-soy condiment sold in England from around the turn of the nineteenth century, traditionally credited to one Peter Harvey and long marketed by the Lazenby firm, it was a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian larders and turns up often in game and steak sauces of the period. The combination it sits in here — sweet fortified wine, citrus, cayenne, and a salty fermented base — is a common English treatment for wild fowl, whose meat is lean, dark and often faintly livery in a way that farmed duck is not. Sugar and port flatter that gaminess rather than masking it. That such a sauce still merited a place in a household book of this kind suggests how much wild duck and goose were still eaten at ordinary tables before the market hunting of waterfowl was curtailed.