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GRAVY, ORANGE (suitable for Wild Water-fowl)
Cut a small onion into little pieces, and put it into a saucepan, with half a pint of veal stock, three or four leaves of basil, and the rind of a Seville orange-or, failing this, a lemon. Simmer gently for twenty minutes, strain the gravy, and add the juice of the orange, half a salt-spoonful of salt, half a salt-spoonful of pepper, and a wine-glassful of port or claret. Return the liquid to the saucepan, make it as hot as possible without letting it boil, and serve in a tureen. Probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A thin, sharp pan sauce rather than a thickened gravy — closer to a French bigarade than to anything poured from a roasting tin. Two details carry it: bitter orange, and the fact that it must never boil once the juice and wine go in.
- The hinge: no boiling at the endFresh orange juice turns flat and faintly cooked-marmalade if it boils, and the wine loses its edge. Bring it to just below a simmer — steaming, no bubbles breaking — and take it straight to the table.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use a good gelatinous veal stock if you have one; the sauce has no thickening at all and depends on the stock for body.
- Salt-spoonfulA Victorian salt spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so this is about ⅛ teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Season by taste at the end instead — stock salinity varies far more now than it did with homemade veal broth.
- Wine-glassfulIn cookery books of this period a wine glass is about 2 fl oz (¼ cup). Port gives a sweeter, rounder result; claret keeps it drier and is the better match for a strong-flavoured duck.
- Seville orangeA bitter marmalade orange, in British shops only from about January to February. The lemon substitute the book allows works, but a better stand-in is the juice of one sweet orange with a squeeze of lemon, plus a strip of the sweet orange's zest.
- Paring the rindTake the zest in wide strips with a peeler and leave the white pith behind; pith that goes into the pan will simmer bitterness into the sauce.
- BasilFresh leaves, added whole and strained out. Dried basil goes musty in a clear sauce like this — if you have none fresh, leave it out rather than substitute.
- Yield and serviceSomething over a cupful of finished sauce for five or six, which is a spoonful or two each over the carved bird. Warm the tureen, since there is no fat or flour to hold heat.
Bitter orange with wildfowl is a long-established flavour pairing in European cookery — sharp fruit against dark, strong, sometimes fishy-tasting meat, the same logic that puts cherries with duck and redcurrant with venison. Bitter oranges reached Britain from the later Middle Ages and were being imported in quantity by the seventeenth century; too sour to eat raw, they belonged in the kitchen rather than the fruit bowl. The French sauce for duck built on them, sauce bigarade, is generally traced to the same tradition. Cassell's specifies the gravy for wild water-fowl because widgeon, teal and wild duck were common market game in late-Victorian Britain and their flesh was much rankier than the farmed duck of today. The costing of threepence, wine excluded, is typical of the book's habit of pricing every dish for a household mistress keeping accounts.