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Orange Sauce
cup Port wine 4 tablespoons currant jelly 1 cup stock juice and grated rind of two oranges Melt butter; add flour, mustard, salt, stock, cook ten minutes; add currant jelly, cook five minutes; add orange juice, rind, and wine. Serve when hot.
A classic bigarade-style sauce for duck, goose, venison or ham: a small brown roux loosened with stock, sweetened with currant jelly, and finished off the heat with orange and Port.
- Quantities to establishThe list as printed gives no amounts for the butter, flour, mustard and salt, and the Port measure has lost its fraction. A working sauce of this type uses roughly 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour for 1 cup stock, about 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard, and 1/4 to 1/2 cup Port.
- The hinge: add the wine and juice lastThe recipe adds both after the cooking is finished and then serves; it specifies no further cooking, though it does not actually say to take the pan off the heat. Prolonged boiling of Port drives off its aroma, and boiling orange juice dulls it and can make the rind harsh.
- Ten minutes mattersThe long simmer of the roux and stock is what cooks out the raw-flour taste and thickens the sauce properly. Do not shorten it, and stir the bottom of the pan.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard probably means dry mustard -- unqualified "mustard" in a cooked sauce of this kind is most often mustard powder rather than prepared paste, though the recipe does not specify. Whisk it into the butter and flour so it disperses without lumping.
- StockBrown stock or a good beef or veal broth. If your stock is already salted, hold the salt until the jelly has gone in and the sauce is reduced.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, still sold for exactly this purpose. It should melt completely; if the sauce looks streaky, strain it before adding the orange.
- RindGrate only the coloured zest of the two oranges and leave the white pith behind. A squeeze of lemon sharpens the sauce if it tastes flabby.
- YieldRoughly two cups of finished sauce, depending on how much Port is used. It thickens as it cools and can be rewarmed gently, though the orange fades on standing.
Sweet-sour orange sauces for rich roast meat are old European kitchen practice, generally traced to the bitter Seville orange, which arrived in Mediterranean cooking well before the sweet orange and gave the French sauce bigarade its name. In American household books like this one, cooks worked with sweet orange juice and rind plus a jar of currant jelly, a pantry staple of the era used constantly to point up game and mutton. The Port is doing the same job as the jelly from the other direction, and the whole thing sits on a simple foundation of butter, flour, and liquid.