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Gravy for Wild Fowl
Put into a small saucepan a blade of mace, a piece of lemon peel, two tablespoonfuls each of mushroom catsup, walnut catsup and strained lemon juice, two shallots cut in slices; and two wineglassfuls of port wine; put the saucepan over the fire and boil the contents; then strain, and add it to the gravy that has come from the fowl while roasting. If there should be a large quantity of gravy, less wine, catsup, etc., will be necessary,
A sharp, dark sauce built on two Victorian bottled condiments and finished with the roasting-pan drippings. The whole thing takes ten minutes once the bird is out of the oven.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, so two wineglassfuls is roughly half a cup of port. Use a tawny or ruby port, not a cooking wine.
- Blade of maceA blade is one whole piece of the dried aril that surrounds nutmeg, not a spoonful of ground mace. If you only have ground, a pinch is enough, and it will cloud the sauce rather than infuse it cleanly.
- Walnut catsupA thin, dark, salty condiment made from green walnuts, vinegar and spice. It has largely vanished from American shelves but is still bottled in Britain; a good mushroom ketchup or a mix of Worcestershire and soy stands in for the savory, near-black depth it contributes.
- Mushroom catsupAlso thin and dark, closer to soy sauce than to tomato ketchup, which is what the word means today. Do not substitute tomato ketchup here.
- Boil, then strainThe point of the boil is to drive off the raw alcohol and pull flavor from the mace, peel and shallot. Two or three minutes at a rolling boil is enough; straining afterward is not optional, since the mace blade and shallot slices have given up what they have.
- The pan gravy"Gravy that has come from the fowl" means the drippings in the roasting pan, skimmed of fat, to which the strained port mixture is added. Oscar's closing note is the real instruction: this is a concentrate to be balanced against however much drippings the bird gave, not a fixed quantity.
- YieldAs written it makes something under a cup of concentrate before the drippings go in -- roughly seven fluid ounces, and less once it has boiled.
Sauces of this kind, port sharpened with lemon and a bottled savory catsup, were a common American and English accompaniment to wild duck, widgeon, teal and grouse in the nineteenth century. Walnut and mushroom catsups predate tomato ketchup by roughly a century, and both were pantry staples for pan sauces of this sort. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms in an era when wild fowl still appeared on hotel menus in quantity, shot by market gunners and shipped in by rail. Federal restrictions on the market hunting of migratory birds, beginning in the 1910s, ended that trade, which is why a sauce written for the hotel trade now reads as a recipe for the occasional hunter or for farmed duck.