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Bigarade Sauce
(For Wild Fowl.) Ingredients.
Half a pint of good brown Sauce.
The juice of one Orange and one Lemon.
A small Shalot chopped very fine.
One gill of Port Wine or Claret.
A pinch of castor Sugar.
Mix all these ingredients and boil well for five minutes; then strain and serve very hot.
Pulled Fowl or Turkey.
Ingredients.
One pint of white Stock.
One ounce of Butter.
Half an ounce of Flour.
One gill of Cream.
A short, sharp sauce for duck, teal or widgeon, built on a brown sauce you are expected to have already. The text runs on into the beginning of an unrelated recipe for pulled fowl, which stops mid-ingredient-list; ignore it.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure, about 1 1/4 US cups; a gill is 5 fl oz, or half a cup.
- The brown sauce is the work"Good brown Sauce" means a properly made brown sauce: brown roux, browned mirepoix, brown stock, simmered and skimmed. Everything here depends on it. A thin or floury base gives a thin, floury bigarade.
- Bigarade means bitter orangeThe name points to the Seville or bitter orange, sour and aromatic. The orange-and-lemon combination here gives something of that sourness; if you can get Sevilles in their short winter season, use one and drop the lemon.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar, nothing more. A pinch is right; the sauce should read as bitter and acid against fatty fowl, not as an orange glaze.
- Five minutes is the limitHard, prolonged boiling dulls the freshness of the citrus. Five minutes, as directed, is enough to marry the shallot and wine into the base.
- The winePort gives sweetness and body, claret gives more acid and less sugar. If using port, hold back the pinch of sugar until you have tasted the finished sauce.
- StrainingPush through a fine sieve or chinois to catch the shallot and any pulp. The finished sauce should be glossy and just coating; if it slackens on straining, reduce briefly rather than adding more thickener.
- ServingServe it very hot, as the recipe directs; it loses its gloss if it stands and cools.
Bigarade takes its name from the bigaradier, the sour or Seville orange tree, and the sauce is the ancestor of the restaurant duck a l'orange that outlived it. Classical French practice built it on the roasting juices of the duck itself, deglazed and mounted with espagnole; the version here is the simplified form, taking a ready-made brown sauce off the stove and turning it into a game sauce in five minutes. That it is marked "for wild fowl" is telling: bitter orange, shallot and fortified wine served as counterweights to the strong, oily flesh of wild duck. The abrupt jump into "Pulled Fowl or Turkey" at the end is a printing artefact of the original book, where recipes run one into the next.