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Green Sauce, for Ducks and Young Geese
Put half a pint of green gooseberries into a saucepan, with a quarter of a pint of cold water, and three or four lumps of sugar. Let them simmer gently until quite soft and broken; then press them through a sieve, and return the pulp to the pan, with a piece of butter the size of a walnut, four table-spoonfuls of sorrel-juice, made by pounding sorrel-leaves in a mortar, and squeezing the pulp in muslin till the juice runs out. Simmer for a minute or two, then add a glass of sherry or Madeira, and serve very hot. Probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A tart fruit-and-herb sauce for rich poultry, and one that depends entirely on keeping the acidity bright rather than cooking it flat. Everything here scales easily; the only real difficulty is sourcing the two seasonal ingredients.
- The hinge: keep the sorrel juice barely cookedSorrel loses its fresh green colour quickly under heat, turning a drab olive. Add the juice, bring the pan just back to a simmer, and take it off — treat the "minute or two" as a maximum, not a target.
- Half a pint of gooseberriesAn imperial half-pint by volume is about 10 fl oz (roughly 1 1/4 US cups), which for whole gooseberries comes to somewhere around 7 oz (200 g). The quarter-pint of water is a little over 1/2 cup (about 140 ml).
- Lumps of sugarLump sugar of the period was nipped from a loaf and lumps varied in size; a rough teaspoon each is a reasonable working guess, so three or four lumps is only 3-4 teaspoons — a lightly sweetened sauce, and worth tasting rather than measuring, since green gooseberries vary enormously in acidity.
- Butter the size of a walnutSomewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons (15-25 g). The comparison is to a shelled walnut, not one in the shell.
- A glass of wineA wineglassful in Victorian recipes is generally taken as about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup). A dry amontillado or a Sercial Madeira suits the sauce better than a cream sherry.
- Getting four tablespoons of sorrel juiceSorrel is nearly all water but gives up its juice reluctantly when pounded raw; expect to need several ounces of leaves, stems stripped, to yield 4 tablespoons. Sorrel is a spring green sold at farmers' markets and rarely at supermarkets; French sorrel and garden sorrel both work.
- Green gooseberriesThese are hard, unripe fruit picked in late spring, noticeably more acidic than the riper dessert gooseberries of high summer — which is the point of the sauce. Frozen fruit is one option where fresh is unavailable.
- Use a non-reactive panGooseberries and sorrel are both strongly acidic and will pick up a metallic taste and a grey cast from bare aluminium or unseasoned iron. Stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Yield and servingA modest quantity of thin, spoonable sauce — enough for the five or six the original claims, at a spoonful each. Serve it hot in a warmed boat alongside roast duck or goose.
Gooseberry with green goose — a young bird killed early in the season, before it had fattened on stubble — was the standard pairing by the eighteenth century. The idea that the fruit is named for the bird is traditional folk etymology rather than settled fact; the name is more often traced to an alteration of an older form of the word. What makes Cassell's version distinctive is the sorrel, a leaf whose sharpness comes from oxalic acid and which French cookery had long used in sauces for shad and veal; combining it with gooseberry doubles down on acidity in a way that reads as very much of its period, when the job of a sauce for roast poultry was to cut grease rather than to add sweetness. The "probable cost, 3d." is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every dish for a middle-class household keeping accounts, though the wine is left out of the reckoning, as costings routinely omitted it because its price varied enormously.