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Orange Sauce for Ducks and Wild Fowl
Boil the yellow rind of two Seville oranges until it is quite tender. Cut it into thin strips about half an inch long. Pour over these the strained juice of the oranges, a glassful of sherry or Madeira, and a quarter of a pint of white stock. Simmer gently for five or six minutes, then add a pinch of cayenne and a little salt, if required. Serve very hot. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A thin, sharp pan sauce rather than a thickened gravy — closer to the bigarade sauces of French practice than to the cornflour-glossed orange sauce of later cookbooks. Two things decide whether it works: bitter oranges, and rind pared without pith.
- Seville orangesThese are bitter marmalade oranges, in British shops only from late December to February. Out of season, the usual stand-in is the juice of a sweet orange sharpened with lemon juice, roughly three parts to one, but the aromatic bitterness of the real fruit is what the sauce is built on.
- Pare the rind, not the peel"The yellow rind" means the coloured zest only. White pith carried along will make the sauce harshly bitter, and boiling will not wholly remove it. Use a swivel peeler, then trim the strips flat before cutting.
- How long to boil the rind"Quite tender" is likely to take half an hour or so of simmering, and it is worth changing the water once or twice. Undercooked strips stay leathery and dominate the plate.
- A quarter of a pintIn an English book of this date, 5 fl oz — about two-thirds of a US cup.
- A glassful of wineGenuinely imprecise. Period wine glasses ran small; 2 to 3 fl oz is the sensible reading, and the sauce will take up to 4 fl oz without collapsing.
- White stockA pale unthickened veal or chicken stock, made without browning. Use a light homemade or low-sodium stock; a dark, heavily reduced commercial stock will muddy both the colour and the flavour, and will make the added salt unnecessary.
- The five-or-six-minute simmerShort on purpose. It is there to marry the wine and stock and drive off raw alcohol, not to reduce; long boiling flattens the fresh orange juice, which is the point of the sauce.
- Consistency and servingIt stays deliberately loose — spoon it over the carved bird rather than expecting it to coat. Sufficient for five or six as written; double it if you want enough to pass at table.
Orange with duck and wild fowl is one of the oldest surviving fruit-and-meat pairings in European cooking, and the bitter Seville orange — not the sweet dessert orange — was the fruit meant by it for centuries. French kitchens formalised it as sauce bigarade, from the old name for the bitter orange, and English cookery books absorbed the idea with the fortified wine of their own cellars, sherry or Madeira. A sharp acid sauce was the standard answer to the oiliness of duck and the muskiness of wild birds. The costing — fourpence, wine excluded — is a reminder that these books were written for households where the mistress checked the accounts, and that the price of wine varied too widely to state.