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Gravy for Goose or Duck
Put a piece of butter the size of a small egg into a saucepan, and fry in it, until lightly browned, two onions, sliced, and half a tea-spoonful of powdered sage. Add a cupful of good brown gravy, a grain of cayenne, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and a pinch of salt, if the gravy has not been already seasoned. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, then strain, return the liquid to the saucepan, and add a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, and a wine-glassful of port or claret. Make the gravy as hot as possible, without boiling, after the wine is added. Time, altogether, about half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 3d. Sufficient for half a pint of gravy.
A sharp, wine-finished onion gravy meant to cut the fat of a roast goose or duck. Most of the work is in reading the Victorian measures correctly.
- Do not boil after the wine goes inThe instruction to make it "as hot as possible, without boiling" is the hinge. Port or claret added at the end keeps its fruit and body; a hard boil drives off the aromatics and leaves a flat, slightly bitter edge.
- Butter the size of a small eggAround 1.5 to 2 oz, so 40-50 g. Enough to sweat and lightly colour two sliced onions without their catching.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is small, usually reckoned at 2 to 2½ fl oz, roughly a quarter cup, not a modern 6 oz pour. More than that and the gravy tastes of raw wine.
- A cupful and a grainTake the cupful as about 8 fl oz. "A grain of cayenne" is best read not as the apothecaries' weight but as the smallest pinch that will sit on a knife point.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard paste, mixed from English mustard powder and water, not dry powder and not a seedy Dijon. Stir it in off the strongest heat so it does not turn acrid.
- The pepper is heavy-handedHalf a teaspoon of black pepper plus cayenne in half a pint of gravy is assertive by current taste. Add half of it, taste after straining, and correct.
- "Good brown gravy"The book assumes a roux-thickened brown sauce or the strained, thickened pan juices of a roast. A well-reduced brown stock, lightly thickened, does the same job; a cube-based gravy will make the finished sauce salty once it reduces.
- YieldHalf an imperial pint, about 10 fl oz or 1¼ cups. Enough for four to six servings alongside a bird, since the sauce is potent rather than poured freely.
Goose and duck are fatty birds, and English cookery has answered that fat with onion, sage and something acid for centuries: the same logic that puts sage-and-onion stuffing inside the bird puts it into the gravy served beside it. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a late-Victorian household compendium arranged alphabetically and priced to the penny, gives the cost as 3d exclusive of the wine, which tells you where the expense in a middle-class kitchen actually lay: the onions, butter and stock were trivial, the port or claret was not. The mustard is the distinctly English touch here, generally traced to the same taste that put mustard beside roast beef and boiled pork, and it does the work that a squeeze of orange or a spoonful of vinegar does in other traditions.