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Teal, Sauce For
Take a small onion and a shallot chopped fine, four or five leaves of sweet basil, and the peel of a lemon shredded small, and put these into half a pint of stock. Let this boil five minutes, strain, and add a salt-spoonful of salt, half that quantity of cayenne, a few drops of vinegar, the juice of a lemon, and a glass of port wine. Serve very hot.
A thin, sharp Victorian game sauce built on stock, port and citrus — closer to a jus than to anything thickened. It comes together in under ten minutes and wants to be made while the birds rest.
- Half a pint of stockIn an English book of this date, 10 fl oz — about 1¼ cups. Use a strong brown duck or chicken stock; with no roux, flour or butter in the recipe, the stock's own body is all the sauce has.
- A glass of portUnspecified, and glasses varied. A wine glass of the period held roughly 2 fl oz, which is the sensible reading here; more than 4 fl oz will swamp the lemon and basil.
- Salt-spoonfulThe salt spoon was a small serving implement, about a quarter teaspoon. So roughly ¼ teaspoon salt and ⅛ teaspoon cayenne — season to taste at the end instead, since stock strength varies.
- Lemon peelShred only the yellow zest with no white pith attached; five minutes of boiling is enough to pull bitterness from pith into the stock.
- Add the wine off the boilThe port, lemon juice and vinegar go in after straining. Hard boiling once the wine is in cooks off its aroma and leaves a flat, slightly stewed taste; bring back only to a bare simmer to serve very hot.
- Sweet basilFour or five leaves of fresh basil, not dried. Victorian kitchens also kept dried basil, but the fresh leaf is what gives this sauce its point against the strong flesh of wild duck.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; half a pint of stock plus wine makes a modest quantity, enough for a few of these small birds. Teal are small — reckon on one per person. Nothing in the text extends the sauce to widgeon or mallard, though it would suit them.
- If it tastes too thinReduce the strained stock by a third before the wine and juice go in, rather than thickening it. The recipe includes no thickening at all, so it is a thin sauce that pools around the bird rather than coating it.
Teal is the smallest of the European wild ducks, and Victorian cookery treated it as the most delicate of the wildfowl — roasted fast and served underdone, with a sauce whose job was to cut richness rather than add it. The pattern here is entirely conventional for game of the period: stock, port, lemon and cayenne, a formula that shades into the various "wild duck sauces" and bigarade-style preparations found across nineteenth-century English books, and it belongs to the older habit of sending game to table with a sharp wine-and-citrus liquor. Cassell's cookery dictionaries were compiled for middle-class households; the New Dictionary of Cookery is generally dated to the turn of the century rather than any precise decade. Wildfowl still reached ordinary poulterers in season, and separate sauces for the different ducks were a practical matter rather than an antiquarian flourish. The inclusion of fresh sweet basil is the one slightly unusual note — it was grown in English kitchen gardens but appears less often than parsley or thyme in printed sauces of this kind.