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Woodcock, Gravy For
Plain melted butter or gravy is generally served with woodcocks. It should be put in a tureen, as if it were poured into the dish with the birds it would destroy their flavour. A sauce prepared as follows may, if preferred, be sent to table with the birds. Put a tea-cupful of veal stock into a saucepan with a small onion, half an inch of thin lemonrind, and five or six leaves of basil. Let the gravy simmer for a few minutes, then strain it. Put with it the juice of a Seville orange or of a lemon, a glassful of claret, and a little salt and cayenne. Make it hot, and serve immediately.
WOODCOCK, GRAVY FOR (another way). (See ORANGE GRAVY FOR TEAL, WIDGEON, SNIPES, WOODCOCK, ETC.)
A short simmered-and-strained sauce of the old school, built on veal stock and finished with wine and bitter citrus. Two points in the text will mislead a modern reader: "melted butter" and "a glassful".
- Serve it apartThe instruction to send the sauce to table in a tureen is the point of the recipe, not fussiness. Woodcock and other small game birds are eaten for their own strong, faintly liverish flavour, and a wine-and-citrus sauce poured over the bird flattens it. Spoon it beside each portion.
- "Plain melted butter"In Victorian English this is not clarified butter but butter sauce: butter worked with a little flour and water or stock and brought just to the boil to thicken. If you want the book's first, simplest option, that is what it means.
- A tea-cupfulUsually reckoned at about a gill, some 5 fl oz, a little over half a cup. Teacups of the period ran smaller than the modern mug, and the quantity is not critical here since the stock reduces very little.
- A glassful of claretA wineglass in nineteenth-century cookery books is about 2 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour. Claret means dry red Bordeaux or anything similar in weight; more than about a quarter-cup will swamp the small amount of stock.
- Seville orangeThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only from late winter and rarely stocked. The recipe already offers lemon as the alternative; a mixture of lemon juice with a little orange juice comes closer to the original's balance of sour and bitter.
- Veal stockA light unthickened veal stock is what is wanted, not a reduced demi-glace, which will read as far too heavy against 2 oz of wine. Unsalted chicken stock is a fair stand-in, and salt only at the end since the sauce is barely reduced.
- Timing and heatSimmer the stock with the aromatics five minutes at most, strain, then add the acid and wine and bring back only to steaming. Boiling after the citrus and claret go in dulls both the basil and the fruit; the sauce is meant to arrive sharp.
- YieldRoughly a cupful of finished sauce. Warm the tureen, since this quantity cools fast.
Woodcock in particular was traditionally roasted undrawn, the trail spread on toast beneath the bird, so the accompanying sauce had to be light and sharp enough not to compete with it. The combination of veal stock, claret and bitter orange belongs to a whole family of Victorian "orange gravies" served with wildfowl, and the cross-reference at the end points the reader to the version for teal, widgeon and snipe. Seville oranges appear often in these sauces, though how bitter orange stood in relation to lemon as a souring agent for game and duck in English kitchens is more a general impression than a documented chronology. Woodcock is now a regulated game bird in most countries and is not sold in shops, but the sauce suits any dark-fleshed bird.