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Wild Fowl, Fillets of, with Bigarade Sauce
Roast three or four wild fowls, take them up, and cut the flesh off each side of the breast and from the sides under the wings. Score the skin, and dish the fillets in a circle with a little bigarade sauce poured over them, and more sent to table in a tureen. This sauce may be made as follows. Take the yellow rind of two oranges without any of the white part, cut it into thin shreds, blanch these in boiling water for two minutes, drain, and put them into an earthenware jar with the strained juice of the lemons. Add a pinch of cayenne and a tea-cupful of good brown gravy. Put the jar into a saucepan, surround it with boiling water, set the pan on the fire, and keep the water boiling till the sauce is very hot. Stir it all the time; add a small glassful of port to it, and it will be ready for serving. The wine may be omitted. Time, two minutes to boil the sauce.
A carving-and-sauce recipe rather than a roasting one: the roasting is assumed, and the point of interest is the bigarade. A few things in the text need untangling before it works at the stove.
- Oranges, then lemonsThe sauce calls for the rind of two oranges but then "the strained juice of the lemons," which have not been mentioned; most likely a slip in the text. Use the juice of the oranges, adding a lemon if more sharpness is wanted; a true bigarade uses bitter Seville oranges, whose sharpness is what is being reached for.
- "Wild fowl"In Victorian cookery this usually means wild duck — mallard, widgeon, teal — rather than goose or pheasant. Three or four birds will yield fillets for perhaps six to eight as a course; a single farmed duck breast per person is the practical modern equivalent, though the flavour is far milder.
- Roasting the birdsWild duck is lean and dries out past medium-rare; a hot oven, 425-450F, for 15-25 minutes depending on the size of the bird, then rest before carving. Overcooked wild duck turns liver-like and no sauce redeems it.
- Scoring the skinThe recipe does not say why; on the carved fillets it would help the sauce cling and keep the skin from curling as the dish stands. Shallow cuts only, through skin and fat but not into the flesh.
- The jar in the water bathThe earthenware jar set in boiling water is a bain-marie, used here so the sauce cannot catch or reduce. Any heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same. "Two minutes to boil the sauce" means two minutes at full heat once hot, not a rolling boil in the jar itself.
- Brown gravyNot pan drippings thickened with flour, but the kitchen's standing brown gravy made from stock; in a large kitchen this might amount to an espagnole. Substitute a well-reduced dark poultry or veal stock; the sauce has no other body.
- Tea-cupfulUsually reckoned at about 5 to 6 fl oz. With the juice and the port this makes something like a cupful of finished sauce, enough to nap the fillets and leave some for the tureen.
- The blanchingTwo minutes in boiling water takes the bitterness off the zest without cooking it soft. Take only the coloured outer rind; any white pith left on will make the sauce genuinely bitter rather than sharp.
Bigarade is the French name for the bitter or Seville orange, and sauce bigarade is one of the classic accompaniments to duck in the nineteenth-century repertoire — the ancestor of the restaurant canard à l'orange. The pairing of waterfowl with sharp fruit is much older than the sauce's codified form: sour orange, verjuice and barberry were all used to cut the richness of duck and goose in medieval and early modern European cooking. Cassell's places this among its "Wild Fowl" entries at a time when wild duck was a common autumn and winter market bird in Britain rather than a rarity, and the recipe's assumption that a cook has "good brown gravy" standing ready is a reminder of how the Victorian kitchen worked: a foundation sauce was kept on hand, and individual dishes were built on it with a few minutes' work at the bain-marie.