Bigarade Sauce
Bigarade is the French name for a Seville orange, and the sauce is described under its English name of Orange Gravy Sauce.
BISQUE is one of those words which when he has the clue to them become the delight of a philologer. It presents as pretty a puzzle as exists in any language. The French lexicographers have given it up as insoluble. Brachet and Littré say frankly that its origin is unknown; the German Scheler follows suit. And, after all, a very little research Bisque might have led the learned Frenchmen to the true meaning of the word. They have been put off the scent by trusting to modern usage. Littré defines a bisque as a soup of crayfish, and that is what it usually means in our day. He has failed however to observe that purists in France never call the soup of crayfish a bisque-they always say a bisque d'écrevisses, implying that there may be a bisque of something else. In some of the old French cookery books the crayfish soup is described perfectly as Potage aux écrivisses en façon de bisque. The word is now employed exactly as we employ such words as marmalade, wine, pomatum, orgeat, saveloy. Marmalade is a conserve of quinces-we give the name to a conserve of oranges. Wine is the juice of the grape; but we speak of cowslip and gooseberry wine. Pomatum is a cosmetic of apples, and never now does an apple enter into it. Orgeat ought to be no other than barley-water--it is now made of almonds without a grain of barley. Saveloy, from the French cervelas, formerly cervelat, is a sausage made of brains, and now there are no brains in it. Precisely in the same way, bisque was a soup of wood-pigeons, and it is now never made of woodpigeons, but nearly always of crayfish. Piscium et summa genus hæsit ulmo Nota quæ sedes fuerat columbis.
Any one who will go back to the French cookery books of the seventeenth century will find invariably that the bisque is made of pigeons, or else of small birds such as quails or partridges, which may be supposed superior to them. It was not merely a soup: one of the books describes it accurately as a soup with a ragout in it; and for the precise meaning of Ragout in French turn to the word. La Varenne, the greatest cook of the seventeenth century before Vatel, gives two receipts for pigeon soup, neither of which he denotes by the name of bisque; but he also gives two, and only two, receipts for bisque, and they are both Bisque soups of pigeon with a ragout or rich garniture addedsomething between the Financial and the Turtle Relish. If the reader goes on turning the pages of La Varenne's book he will come to a receipt for roasting wood-pigeons ; he will find that they are called bisets; and he will there at once detect the origin of the bisque or wood-pigeon broth. The bisque was a soup of the biset-with the biset added to it in the tureen together with a ragout or relish. Having reached this point, the discussion might fairly come to an end. The explanation of the bisque is there, even if we can go no further. There is a detail, however, which it would be well to account for. How are we to account for the fourth letter in bisque, which does not appear in biset? This involves the further question, How does the wood-pigeon come to be called biset? And here, if we go to the Frenchmen for assistance, we find that they are all wrong or if not absolutely wrong, helpless. They say that biset comes from the adjective of colour, bis-brown or whitey-brown; and they candidly confess that they know not whence bis in this sense comes. It is impossible to mention the name of Littré without respect for his extraordinary merits as a lexicographer, and yet he too seems to be infected with the Frenchman's wildness in etymology. The real root of biset is to be found in bois, and the root of bois is the Low Latin boscus, which in English survives in bosk, busk, and bush, and which turns up in French as bisque, bois, buis, and buisson. Just as the Latin discus dropt the k sound and was transformed into daïs, while at the same time there survived a doublet retaining it-disque; so the Latin boscus has survived with the k sound in bisque, and without it in bois and biset. I find in my notes a statement which I am unable for the moment to verifythat Humboldt has derived the name of Basque, or Biscay, from Basoa, a forest, and Baso-coa, belonging to a forest. It would be curious if this should turn out to be the same word, but it is immaterial to the argument. Enough has Bisque been stated to show that a consonant has dropped out of biset, and that the word is by rights bisquet. It does not follow from this that the French etymologists are absolutely wrong in connecting biset with the colour bis-light-brown; but if there is any justification for them, it is not because the wood-pigeon is of a light-brown colour, but because light-brown is the colour of wood, and it is not impossible that the colour as well as the pigeon may be named from the wood. Neither, again, does it follow that, taken literally and by themselves, bisque and biset mean anything more than wood or belonging to a wood. Just as tree came to signify the cross, and irons fetters, the name of the wood might easily pass to the pigeon, and the name of the pigeon to the soup. It is still in the French idiom to add the word pigeon to biset, saying pigeon biset.
The reader will probably expect to find here the old receipt for Bisque, and I give him with pleasure the receipt of La Varenne, which runs as follows:- "Bisque of Young Pigeons. Take young pigeons, cleanse them well and truss them up, which you shall do in making a hole with a knife below the stomach, and thrusting the legs through it. Whiten them; then put them in the pot with a small faggot of fine herbs, and fill the pot with the best broth you have, and have a special care that it may not become black." The grand object was to make it red-to produce a bisque rouge; and in fact it was to develop redness that the crayfish came into play and in the end displaced the pigeon. "Then dry your bread and stew it (mitonnez) in the pigeon broth. Then take it up (dressez), after it is well seasoned with salt, pepper and cloves, garnish it (that is the bisque) with the young pigeons, cockscombs, sweetbreads, mushrooms, mutton-juice, pistachios. Serve, and garnish the rims of the dish with slices of lemon."
This, it will be observed, is a soup of pigeons with the pigeons and a Ragout (see Ragout) in it. What is now called Bisque is neither a soup of pigeons, nor is it Black Cock a soup of any kind with what is properly called a Ragout in it. For the crayfish soup of fame we must go to the pages allotted to the crayfish, and not seek for it in the nest of the wood-pigeon.