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Goose, Cold Sauce For
Put two ounces of green sage-leaves into a jar, with one ounce of thin lemon-rind, a minced shallot, a tea-spoonful of salt, a salt-spoonful of cayenne pepper, and a pint of claret. Soak for a fortnight, then pour off the clear liquid, and serve in a tureen, or boil half a cupful in half a pint of good gravy. If not wanted for immediate use, this sauce may be kept in a bottle closely corked. Probable cost, 2d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for one pint of sauce.
An uncooked steeped sauce, closer to a flavoured wine than to a gravy — the whole method is a fortnight of patience, then a careful decanting. The hinge is the strain: any leaf or rind left in the bottle keeps extracting and turns the sauce bitter and muddy.
- Salt-spoonfulThe salt spoon of a Victorian table setting held roughly a quarter of a teaspoon. Cayenne at that dose in a pint is a background heat, not a hot sauce.
- Two ounces of green sage"Green" means fresh, not dried, and 2 oz by weight is a great deal of leaf — several loosely packed cups. Dried sage is far more concentrated and resinous and will not substitute at anything like the same weight.
- Thin lemon-rindAn ounce of rind pared with no white pith attached, which takes the peel of several lemons. Pith is the main source of bitterness over a two-week soak, so pare shallow.
- ClaretIn an English book of this date claret means red Bordeaux, or any dry, moderately tannic red. Nothing sweet or oaky — the sauce has no sugar to balance it.
- Soak for a fortnightKeep the jar covered and out of the light. The recipe specifies no temperature; a cool larder or a refrigerator will both serve, though the colder the jar the slower the extraction.
- Pour off the clear liquidBetter to strain through muslin than to decant, then bottle and cork tightly. Any solids left behind will keep working and cloud the sauce.
- The two servicesServed cold from a tureen it is a sharp, herbal cutting sauce for cold roast goose. Boiled, half a cupful in half a pint of gravy gives a hot sage-and-claret sauce for the bird straight from the oven — add it near the end so the aromatics are not driven off.
- YieldAbout a pint, which is generous for one goose; the cold version keeps well corked for some weeks under refrigeration.
Sage and goose are one of the oldest fixed pairings in English cookery — sage-and-onion stuffing was standard for roast goose long before Cassell's, the herb's resinous bitterness being held to answer the bird's fat. What this entry does is move the sage out of the stuffing and into a cold infusion, and it belongs to a whole Victorian family of steeped table sauces and "store" sauces kept bottled in the larder: mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, cayenne vinegar, mint in wine. Such preparations suited a household that roasted a large joint and then ate it cold for days, and needed something sharp on hand to make the second and third appearances palatable. The costing — twopence exclusive of the wine — is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every recipe for a middle-class cook keeping accounts, and quietly acknowledges that the claret was the whole expense.