Orange Sauce
for wild ducks and other such fowl.
Boil half a pint of brown gravy, and add a somewhat less quantity of claret, with salt, cayenne, the strained juice of two Seville oranges and a scraping of the zest.
A short reduction sauce in the classic French manner: a dark stock base sharpened with red wine and bitter orange. Everything depends on the quality of the gravy, since there are only four other ingredients.
- "Brown gravy" is not gravyIn a book of this date the term generally means a rich brown sauce built on veal or beef stock, often lightly thickened. A reduced dark poultry or veal stock is the nearest modern equivalent; packet gravy will taste of salt and little else.
- Half a pintThe book uses the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. The claret is "somewhat less" — call it a scant cup.
- ClaretSimply red Bordeaux, or any dry, unoaked red. The recipe gives no timing; a few minutes' simmering after the wine goes in will take off its raw edge.
- Seville orangesThese are bitter marmalade oranges, in season roughly January to March and rarely stocked otherwise. Two of them give something like 1/3 to 1/2 cup of sharp juice; in their absence use two parts ordinary orange juice to one part lemon.
- Add the juice off the heatThe original does not say when to take the pan off the heat. If you prefer, add the strained juice and scraped zest away from the boil and then check the seasoning.
- Cayenne, not pepperThe heat is meant to sit behind the fruit rather than announce itself. A pinch is enough for this quantity.
- YieldRoughly a scant pint of finished sauce, enough for two wild ducks or four to six servings.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), written anonymously by the journalist E. S. Dallas around the name of Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, catalogues French restaurant cookery for an English readership — hence the alphabetical entries and the brisk, unmeasured confidence. Bitter orange with wildfowl is one of the oldest surviving marriages in European cooking: the Seville orange reached the Mediterranean well before the sweet orange, and sauces built on its juice and peel are generally traced back through the French sauce bigarade, the ancestor of what is now sold as duck à l'orange. The logic throughout is the same: a fatty, strong-tasting bird wants acid rather than sugar.