Home › S › Sauce, Green (for Green Geese or Ducklings)
Sauce, Green (for Green Geese or Ducklings)
INGREDIENTS. pint of sorrel-juice, 1 glass of sherry, 1/2 pint of green gooseberries, 1 teaspoonful of pounded sugar, 2 oz. of fresh butter.
Boil the gooseberries in water until they are qnite tender; mash them and press them through a sieve; put the pulp into a saucepan with the above ingredients; simmer for 3 or 4 minutes, and serve very hot.
TIME.-3 or 4 minutes.
Sauce Piquante (for Cutlets, Roast Meat, &c.). - INGREDIENTS for sauce for dish for 4 or 5 persons. -2 oz. of butter, 1 small carrot, 6 shalots, 1 small bunch of savoury herbs, including parsley, 1/2 bayleaf, 2 slices of lean ham, 2 cloves, 6 peppercorns, 1 blade of mace, 3 whole allspice, 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 1/2 pint of stock, 1 small lump of sugar, 1/4 saltspoonful of cayenne, salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 18.
Put into a stewpan the butter, with the carrots and shalots, both of which must be cut into small slices; add the herbs, bayleaf, spices and ham (which must be minced rather finely), and let these ingredients simmer over a slow fire until the bottom of the stewpan is covered with a brown glaze.
Keep stirring with a wooden spoon, and put in the remaining ingredients. Simmer very gently for 1/4 hour, skim off every particle of fat, strain the sauce through a sieve, and serve very hot. Care must be taken that this sauce be not made too acid, although it should possess a sharpness indicated by its name. Of course the above quantity of vinegar may be increased or diminished at pleasure, according to taste.
TIME.-Altogether, hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two sauces run together in this entry, both built on the Victorian principle that fat roast meat wants acid alongside it. Neither is difficult, but both carry units and ingredients that need translating.
- Two recipes, one pageThe green sauce ends at "TIME.-3 or 4 minutes." Everything after that belongs to Sauce Piquante, a separate preparation for cutlets and roast meat.
- A genuinely missing quantityThe green sauce opens with "pint of sorrel-juice" with no number in front of it, most likely a printing loss. The recipe calls for 1/2 pint of green gooseberries, which yields rather less than that once mashed and sieved; half a pint (10 fl oz) of sorrel juice is one plausible reading, but any figure here is a reconstruction rather than the original.
- Sorrel juiceNot something you buy. Pound or blitz washed sorrel leaves and press them through a sieve or muslin; a pound of leaves may not yield a full half pint, so allow more. Sorrel is intensely sour and loses its green as soon as it meets heat, which may be why the simmer is kept to three or four minutes.
- Green gooseberriesHard, unripe, mouth-puckeringly tart fruit picked in early summer, quite different from ripe dessert gooseberries. If you cannot get them, unripe or barely ripe gooseberries from a market will do; ripe ones will make the sauce sweet rather than sharp, and the teaspoon of sugar should then be dropped.
- A glass of sherryA Victorian wine glass is about 2 fl oz, not a modern tumbler. Use 2 fl oz (1/4 cup) of dry or medium sherry.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. A quarter of a saltspoonful of cayenne is therefore a pinch — about 1/16 tsp — and that is deliberate, since the sharpness is meant to come from the vinegar.
- Shalots, mace, allspice"Shalots" are shallots; six small ones, or three large. A blade of mace is one piece of the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, sold whole in spice shops; a scant 1/4 tsp of ground mace substitutes. "Whole allspice" means the dried berries, not mixed spice.
- The hinge in Sauce PiquanteEverything depends on the first stage: the butter, carrot, shallot and minced ham must cook slowly until the pan bottom carries a genuine brown glaze. That caramelised residue is the whole flavour of the sauce, and it will not develop if the heat is high enough to burn the shallots or if the pan is crowded and steams.
- PansBoth sauces are strongly acidic. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; bare aluminium or unlined copper will pick up a metallic taste and dull the green.
- YieldSauce Piquante is stated as enough for four or five. The green sauce's yield depends on the missing sorrel quantity; on the half-pint reconstruction it comes to roughly a pint after straining, enough for a roast bird.
A "green goose" was a bird killed young — usually reckoned under four months — and sold in late spring and early summer rather than fattened for the Michaelmas table in September; the sauce's two main ingredients, sorrel and unripe gooseberries, are at their best in that same season. Sharp green fruit with fat poultry and pork is a long-standing pairing in English cookery, and gooseberry sauce for mackerel and gooseberry sauce for goose both belong to that tradition; the folk claim that the gooseberry is named for the goose it was served with is often repeated but not settled, and the name may instead come from a corruption of a French or Dutch word. Sauce Piquante, sitting immediately after it, shows the other half of the Victorian repertoire: a French-derived brown sauce built on a slowly caramelised base of ham, root vegetable and whole spices, sharpened with vinegar and passed through a sieve.