Home › The Principles of Cookery › Teal, Gravy For
Teal, Gravy For
Clean the giblets and put them into a stewpan with a pound of lean beef cut small, or instead of it a table-spoonful of Bovril, a moderate-sized onion chopped small, half a teaspoonful of sugar browning, two or three peppercorns, three cloves, a blade of mace, a sprig of parsley, three inches of thin lemon-rind, and a pint and a half of lukewarm water. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents simmer gently until the liquor is good, then strain and cool it, and skim off the fat. Put the gravy back into the saucepan with a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a table-spoonful of port, and a little salt. Boil up once more, and serve. Or put half a pint of good gravy into a sauce-pan with a small onion finely minced and a roll of orange-or lemon-peel. Let the sauce boil a few minutes, then strain it, season with salt and cayenne, and add the juice of a lemon or Seville orange. Simmer a few minutes longer; put with it a glassful of port or claret, and send it to table very hot. A sliced lemon without the rind is usually sent to table with roast teal.
Two versions of the same sauce: a long-simmered giblet gravy built from scratch, and a quick sharpened gravy for when you already have stock. Both are meant to cut the richness of roast teal with acid and fortified wine.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half here is imperial, about 30 fl oz or a scant litre; half a pint is 10 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons, and a "glassful" of port means a wine glass of the period, roughly 2 fl oz.
- Simmering timeNo time is given for the first gravy. Giblets and a pound of beef in 30 fl oz of water will want something on the order of an hour and a half to two hours at a bare tremble before the liquor is 'good', though the recipe leaves that to the cook's judgement. A hard boil will cloud the liquor.
- Sugar browningA dark caramel cooked from sugar until just short of burnt, then let down with water, used as colouring rather than sweetener. Half a teaspoon is for colour only. Modern gravy browning or a few drops of dark soy do the same work; a home-made caramel is better if you want the faint bitterness.
- BovrilStill sold, and still the intended shortcut for the pound of beef. One tablespoon is salty, so hold back the salt until the gravy is finished and reduced.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not a tomato sauce. Some specialist grocers still stock it; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce plus a little soy is the usual stand-in, though it is sweeter and more tamarind-forward.
- Blade of maceThe dried outer casing of the nutmeg, sold whole in blades. A blade is roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon of ground mace, though the recipe simmers the whole blade with the other aromatics and strains them out, which ground mace will not allow.
- Seville orangesBitter Seville oranges are in the shops only for a few weeks in midwinter. Outside that window, lemon juice with a strip of ordinary orange peel gives a closer result than sweet orange juice, which will make the sauce cloying.
- The port goes in lastThe wine goes in last -- Both versions add the wine at the end. The first boils up once more and serves; the second adds the port or claret after straining and simmering and sends it straight to table very hot, with no further boiling.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Teal are small birds, one per person, and only a spoonful or two of sauce is wanted for each.
Cassell's treats teal as a bird whose whole point is richness, and answers it with acid: lemon, Seville orange, and a sliced lemon sent to table alongside. That pairing of wildfowl with sharp citrus is old in English cookery and generally traced to the medieval and Tudor taste for verjuice and bitter orange with roast meats, which is often said to have survived into the nineteenth century largely in game cookery long after it had faded elsewhere. The giblet gravy itself is thrift as much as flavour: the giblets were drawn from the bird before roasting and would otherwise be wasted. What helps place the entry is the alternative offered in the very first line: a tablespoonful of Bovril in place of a pound of lean beef, which puts the text after Bovril's arrival rather than at any precise date. Bovril reached British kitchens in the 1880s, and cookery books of the following decades cheerfully offered it as a shortcut to the long-simmered meat stocks their earlier editions had insisted upon.