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Bigarade Sauce
Pare the rinds from two oranges, cut them up into small pieces and boil in a saucepan of water for about five minutes, remove and drain. Melt a little butter in a saucepan, stir in one tablespoonful of flour and cook until it browns. Pour in a teacupful of broth, add the juice of two oranges, a little sugar, and salt and pepper to taste; put in the pieces of rind, boil up quickly, pour it into a sauceboat, and serve.
A brown-roux orange sauce of the old school, meant for duck. Two details carry it: the orange you use, and how you cut the rind.
- The orange is the pointBigarade is the Seville or sour orange, sharp and slightly bitter, and that acidity is what the sauce is built around. Modern navel or Valencia oranges will give something merely sweet; correct with a squeeze of lemon, or use Seville juice if you can find it in winter.
- Pare, do not zest"Pare the rinds" means removing the coloured skin only, with a peeler or knife. The recipe then asks for it cut into small pieces; a fine julienne is one way to do that. Keep the white pith off, as it is bitter.
- Why blanch the rindThe five-minute boil draws out harshness and softens the strips so they stay tender in the finished sauce. Drain well, or the water will thin the sauce.
- A teacupfulSomewhere around 1/2 to 3/4 cup (120-180 ml); period teacup measures varied and generally ran smaller than modern mugs. Start low and add more broth if the sauce tightens too far.
- Broth means brown stockBroth here most likely means a brown stock -- veal or duck stock would have been to hand in a hotel kitchen. Use a good brown stock, or the roasting-pan juices from the duck deglazed and strained. Commercial low-sodium chicken stock works, but season at the end since the sauce reduces.
- Brown the roux properlyThe flour and butter should go to the colour of a hazelnut shell before liquid goes in, which takes several minutes over moderate heat and gives the sauce its colour and nutty depth. Stopping at pale blond leaves it tasting of raw flour.
- Sugar is a corrective, not a sweetener"A little sugar" means just enough to balance the acid, a pinch to a small spoonful. With sweet modern oranges you may need none at all; taste before adding.
- Yield and serviceAbout a cup, enough for one roast duck serving three or four. Add the juice near the end and do not hold the sauce long over heat, as prolonged boiling dulls fresh orange.
Bigarade is the French name for the bitter Seville orange, Citrus x aurantium, a fruit too sour to eat out of hand but long valued in kitchens for juice, peel and marmalade. Sauce bigarade is the classical accompaniment to duck, and the pairing of duck with sour orange is generally traced to French cookery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, later codified in the repertoire that Escoffier's generation inherited. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, was compiling in 1896 a book meant to put the working vocabulary of a great American hotel kitchen into print, and a sauce like this one belonged to the everyday grammar of that kitchen rather than to any signature dish. His version is notably plain, a brown roux, stock, juice and blanched peel, without the caramel-and-vinegar gastrique that some later French practice favoured, though classical bigarade recipes vary and Escoffier's own is built on the roasting juices with juice and julienned rind; the dish most Americans know as duck a l'orange is a descendant of the same line.