Home › The Principles of Cookery › HARROGATE SAUCE (for Wild-fowl)
HARROGATE SAUCE (for Wild-fowl)
Mix a pinch of grated lemon-rind and a chopped shallot, and pour over them a table-spoonful of lemon-juice, and a table-spoonful of mushroom or walnut ketchup, add half a tea-spoonful of powdered mace and three grains of cayenne, and let them infuse for half an hour. Mix a table-spoonful of boiling water with the gravy which comes from the fowl, put it into a saucepan with the other ingredients, and simmer for ten minutes. Add a wine-glassful of claret, strain, and serve in a tureen. Probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A sharp, spiced claret sauce for roast grouse, duck or teal. Almost everything here is measured in units or products that have shifted since the 1870s.
- Three grains of cayenneA grain is an apothecary weight of about 65 mg, so three grains is roughly 200 mg, on the order of a tenth of a teaspoon — a small pinch, not a spoonful.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is about 2 fl oz (60 ml), not the 6 oz a modern glass holds. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or any dry, moderately tannic red.
- Mushroom and walnut ketchupBoth are thin, dark, salty spiced condiments, made by salting mushrooms or green walnuts and steeping the liquor with spices; they taste nothing like tomato ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; failing that, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce or light soy with a few drops of vinegar gives a similar salt-and-umami lift.
- The gravy which comes from the fowlThis means the juices in the roasting pan, skimmed of most fat, not a thickened gravy. If your bird gives up little, deglaze the pan with the tablespoon of boiling water to lift what has caught.
- Half a teaspoon of maceGround mace loses volatiles fast and half a teaspoon of fresh mace is assertive. If your jar is old, the half spoon is about right; if it is new, start with a quarter.
- Order of operationsThe half-hour infusion of shallot, lemon rind, juice and ketchup does the flavour work — do not shortcut it. The original adds the claret only after the ten-minute simmer and then strains and serves without further cooking; a long boil dulls the wine and the point of the sauce is its edge.
- Straining and servingStrain through a fine sieve, pressing the shallot to extract the juices, and serve hot in a warmed jug. It is a thin, pouring sauce and will not coat; do not try to thicken it.
- YieldThe measured liquids come to about 3½ fl oz before the pan juices are added, so the finished quantity depends on how much gravy the bird gives; the recipe reckons it sufficient for three or four servings alongside game. It reheats badly once the wine has been cooked, so make it while the bird rests.
This sauce belongs to the mid-Victorian shooting season, when grouse from the Yorkshire moors, wild duck and teal reached town tables in quantity and needed something sharper than a plain gravy. The name is generally taken as a nod to Harrogate, the Yorkshire spa whose sulphur and chalybeate springs made it one of the most fashionable resorts of the period and a natural base for moorland shooting parties — though, as with most such sauce names in nineteenth-century dictionaries, the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The construction is thoroughly of its time: a cold infusion of shallot, lemon and spice, married to the roasting-pan juices and lifted with claret and a mushroom or walnut ketchup, the two store-cupboard condiments that carried savoury depth in British kitchens before commercial tomato ketchup and bottled sauces displaced them. The costing of threepence, wine excluded, is a reminder that Cassell's expected its readers to keep accounts.