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Sauces (Cup poultry stock orange)
1 cup poultry stock 1 orange Follow directions for making brown sauce. Add the shredded peel of the orange, and simmer until peel is tender. Add the juice of the orange just before serving. Serve with goose or duck. .
A short variation entry that assumes you already have the book's brown sauce in front of you. Two details carry the whole thing: how you cut the peel and when the juice goes in.
- The hinge: juice off the heatThe hinge: juice at the last moment -- The recipe adds the orange juice "just before serving" rather than simmering it in. Long boiling dulls the fresh citrus edge the sauce is there to provide.
- The brown sauce it depends onA period brown sauce for 1 cup of stock is typically a roux of about 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour browned before the hot stock goes in; check the book's own brown sauce entry for its proportions. Cook the flour past pale blond or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- "Shredded peel"This means the coloured zest only, cut in fine julienne with a knife or peeler — not grated, and none of the white pith, which is where the bitterness lives. A microplane gives mush rather than the strips the recipe intends.
- Simmering the peelFine strips need roughly 10 to 15 minutes in the sauce to soften. If your oranges are thick-skinned, blanch the strips in boiling water for a minute first and drain, which shortens the simmer and takes off any harshness.
- Oranges then and nowModern eating oranges are bred for sweetness, so the sauce can come out flabby. A Seville or bitter orange, or a squeeze of lemon added with the juice, gets closer to the sharp edge that cuts through goose fat.
- StockUse the roasting-pan juices from the bird, skimmed of fat, or a good unsalted poultry stock. Salted commercial broth reduced into a roux sauce goes salty fast; season at the end.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 cup, enough for four to six portions of duck or goose. Serve it hot in a boat rather than poured over the skin, which otherwise goes soft.
Sauces built on browned stock and bitter orange are a long-standing companion to fatty roast waterfowl; the French classical version, sauce bigarade, takes its name from the sour bigarade orange, and the pairing follows the same logic as apple with pork — acid against fat. By the early twentieth century the sauce appears in American home cook books in exactly this form: a house brown sauce, and a short entry telling you what to add to it.