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Shikaree Sauce, for Ducks and Wild Fowl
Mix a tea-spoonful of cayenne with a table-spoonful of powdered white sugar. Put the mixture into a small saucepan, and pour over it two glassfuls of mushroom ketchup, two glassfuls of claret, and the strained juice of a large fresh lemon. Stir the liquor over the fire till the sugar is dissolved and it is quite hot. Serve immediately. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A thin, sharp pouring sauce rather than a thickened gravy — closer to a hot ketchup than to anything you would call a jus. It takes five minutes, and the only real skill is restraint with the heat.
- What a glassful meansThe recipe says only "glassful". Victorian cookery books most often meant a wine glass by this, usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup), which would give roughly 1/2 cup ketchup and 1/2 cup claret. The measure is genuinely loose and is sometimes given as 2 1/2 or 3 fl oz; start at 2 fl oz each and judge the balance.
- The cayenne is not a misprint, but it is a lotA full teaspoon of cayenne in roughly a cup of liquid gives a sauce meant to stand up to strong-tasting wild duck. There is no way to know how the heat of Victorian cayenne compared with what is sold now, so add half, taste, and build up.
- Mushroom ketchupThis is the thin, near-black, intensely salty mushroom liquor still sold in Britain, not tomato ketchup. Without it the sauce has no backbone; a dark soy-and-Worcestershire blend gets partway there but is saltier and less earthy.
- ClaretSimply red Bordeaux, or any dry, moderately tannic red. Nothing sweet or oaky — the sugar and the lemon are already doing that work.
- Do not let it boilThe instruction is to heat until the sugar dissolves and the sauce is hot, no further. Boiling drives off the wine's fruit and concentrates the salt in the ketchup into something harsh.
- Lemon lastLemon -- The recipe adds the strained juice along with the ketchup and claret, before the pan goes on the fire, so squeeze and strain it while you assemble the rest. If you prefer, hold it back and stir it in once the sugar has dissolved: its point is freshness against the ketchup, and prolonged heat flattens it.
- ServingSix to eight portions of a sauce this concentrated means a tablespoon or two per person, spooned over carved duck or passed in a warm jug. It is not a sauce to nap a plate with.
"Shikaree" is an anglicised shikari, the Hindi and Urdu word for a hunter or a hunting guide, and the name places this among the Anglo-Indian recipes that appear in Victorian British cookbooks. The pairing is logical enough: sauces for wild fowl were traditionally sharp and highly seasoned to cut the strong, sometimes fishy flavour of birds shot on estuaries and marshes, and cayenne fitted that job neatly. Mushroom ketchup, claret and lemon were all standard Victorian larder items for game sauces, so the recipe reads less as an import than as a British formula given an Indian heat and an Indian name.