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Orange Sauce (Cup butter Few grains cayenne)
1/4 cup butter Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup flour Juice 2 oranges 1⅓ cups Brown Stock 2 tablespoons Sherry wine ½ teaspoon salt Rind of 1 orange, cut in fancy shapes Brown the butter, add flour, with salt and cayenne, and stir until well browned. Add stock gradually, and just before serving, orange juice, Sherry, and pieces of rind.
A brown roux sauce sharpened with orange, meant for duck, goose or game. The whole thing hangs on how far you take the butter and flour before the stock goes in.
- The garbled quantityThe "11/3 cups" of brown stock is 1 1/3 cups, a typesetting casualty of the fraction. The salt reads as 1½ teaspoons, though the same fault that mangled the stock figure may have added the "1" to a plain ½ teaspoon; either way it is on the generous side for 1 1/3 cups of already-seasoned stock, so start with half and correct at the end.
- Browning the butter and flourThis is the hinge. Brown the butter until it smells nutty and the milk solids are hazelnut-coloured, then add the flour and keep stirring over moderate heat until the roux is the colour of an old penny, five to eight minutes. Stop short and the sauce tastes of raw flour; push too far and the flour loses thickening power and turns bitter.
- Adding the stockOff the heat or on low, add the warm stock a little at a time, whisking smooth between additions. A quarter cup of flour to 1 1/3 cups of liquid is a heavy proportion by modern taste; the result is a coating sauce rather than a pouring one. Thin with more stock if you want it looser.
- Brown StockIn this book that means a long-simmered stock from browned beef shin and bones with vegetables. A good unsalted beef or veal stock stands in; if using commercial stock, cut the added salt back sharply.
- The orange juice goes in lastAcid and prolonged heat flatten citrus. Two oranges give roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice, which is a lot against 1 1/3 cups of stock. Add it at the end, off the boil, and taste as you go rather than tipping it all in.
- The rindPare the zest with no white pith, cut it into julienne or small diamonds, and blanch it in boiling water for a minute or two before adding. Raw zest strips are harsh and leathery in a finished sauce.
- SherryA dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry. Added at the end it stays aromatic; boiled, it goes flat and slightly sour.
- YieldRoughly 2 cups once juice and sherry go in, enough for a duck or a roast serving six to eight.
Sauces built on orange and browned meat stock are much older than this book, descending from the sauce bigarade of French cookery, which used the bitter Seville orange whose season is short and whose juice is sour enough to cut rich waterfowl. The recipe is generally attributed to Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School, and it leans on cayenne and sherry for an edge a bitter orange would have supplied on its own. The instruction to cut the rind "in fancy shapes" belongs to the same period sensibility as aspic moulds and radish roses: at the turn of the century a sauce was expected to look composed on the plate, not merely taste right.