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Ricardo Sauce for Game, Etc
Take any bones of cold roast game that may be left from a previous dressing, chop them into small pieces, and dredge a table-spoonful of flour over them. Slice four moderate-sized onions, and fry them in butter until they are lightly browned without being burnt; put them into a clean saucepan with the bones, half a pint of stock made from bones, a quarter of a teaspoonful of Bovril, a crust of toasted bread, a glassful of sherry, and a little pepper and salt. Stir the sauce over the fire till done enough, rub it through a fine sieve, heat it again, and serve. Time, a quarter of an hour to simmer the sauce. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A thrift sauce built on the carcass of yesterday's roast, thickened with flour and a crust of toast rather than a roux. It is closer to a quick gravy than a stock-based sauce, and it stands or falls on how deeply you brown the onions.
- Half a pintCassell's is British, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. "Made from bones" means a plain brown stock, not a concentrate.
- A glassful of sherryA wine glass in this period is roughly 2 fl oz. Use a dry or medium sherry — amontillado or fino; cream sherry will make the sauce cloying against game.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the same idea: a salty beef extract paste. A quarter teaspoon is a seasoning, not a base. Any beef or yeast extract works in the same quantity; taste before adding further salt.
- The onions are the dish"Lightly browned without being burnt" is doing a lot of work. Take the four onions slowly in butter until they are genuinely golden and sweet, 20 to 25 minutes over medium-low heat. Rushed pale onions give a thin, raw-tasting sauce.
- The crust of toastA traditional thickener and colouring agent. Use a well-browned, not blackened, crust of plain bread — burnt toast turns the sauce bitter, and the flour dredged over the bones is already thickening it.
- Fifteen minutes is a minimumThe stated quarter of an hour will heat the sauce through but extracts little from the bones. Thirty to forty minutes at a bare simmer, topped up with stock or water as it reduces, gives noticeably more depth.
- Rubbing through the sieveLift out the bones first, then press the onions, toast and any scraps of meat through a fine sieve — that pulp is the body of the sauce. A food mill or a ladle worked against a chinois is faster than a spoon and a hair sieve.
- Yield and serving"Sufficient for six or eight persons" from only half a pint of stock and a glass of sherry, plus the onion pulp, means small servings of a concentrated sauce — well under a pint once it has simmered down. It suits roast game birds, venison or hare, and would usually have gone to table in a sauce boat rather than poured over.
Sauces made from the bones of a bird already eaten belong to the mainstream of Victorian and Edwardian household economy, where a roast was expected to yield a second and third appearance at table — the carcass to a sauce or a gravy, the last scraps to a rissole. The name "Ricardo" is not explained in Cassell's and does not attach to any standard classical sauce; nineteenth-century cookery books freely coined proper-name titles for house preparations, sometimes after a patron, a chef or simply for effect. What does give the entry an earliest possible date is the Bovril: Johnston's "Fluid Beef" was developed in the 1870s in Canada and took the name Bovril in 1886, after he set up in London, so its appearance here, measured out in quarter-teaspoons like a spice, places the recipe in or after the era when commercial meat extracts had become an ordinary shelf item in the domestic kitchen.