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Sauce for Goose
Pour one-half pint of port wine into a small saucepan, and place it over the fire until very hot but not boiling; then mix with one tablespoonful of made mustard, season to taste with cayenne pepper and salt, and it is ready for use, and should be poured over the bird just prior to serving. Sauce for Roasted Hare or Rabbit Pull out the crumb of a stale French roll, put it into a saucepan, and soak it in port wine, then place the pan on the fire, add a small piece of butter, and beat it to a pulp, adding salt and pepper to taste, then a small quantity of red currant jelly, and one-half wineglassful of vinegar. Boil up once, and serve very hot.
Two short sauces run together on one page: a port-and-mustard sauce for roast goose, and a bread-thickened port sauce for hare. Both are period British sauces of the sort Oscar kept on the Waldorf's roast station.
- Half a pint of portAn American half-pint is one cup (8 fl oz). That reduces to a scant serving sauce for four to six people alongside a goose; double it if the bird is large.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard is mustard already mixed with liquid, as opposed to dry powder. English mustard mixed from powder with a little cold water is the closest match; a tablespoon of it is assertive, which is the point against fatty goose.
- Hot but not boilingThe instruction is the hinge of the first sauce. Held below a simmer, the port keeps its fruit and the mustard stays sharp; brought to a boil, the mustard's volatile heat blows off and the wine turns flat and cooked-tasting. The book gives no temperature; simply keep it short of a simmer.
- Whisk the mustard in off the heatThe recipe mixes the mustard straight into the hot port. If you prefer, slacken the tablespoon of mustard with a spoonful of the warm port first, then stir that back into the pan so it disperses evenly.
- Neither sauce is thickened with flourThe goose sauce stays thin by design and is poured over the bird just prior to serving, as the recipe directs. The hare sauce gets its body entirely from soaked bread crumb, so it will be a rough pulp rather than smooth; beat it hard, or pass it through a sieve if you want it slick.
- Crumb of a stale French rollThe soft interior of one small crusty roll, crusts discarded, is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups loosely packed, or about 2 ounces. Stale bread absorbs wine without turning to paste as fresh bread does.
- A wineglassfulIn cookbooks of this era a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a wineglassful is roughly two tablespoons of vinegar. The recipe does not say which vinegar; add it at the end and taste, since vinegars vary widely in strength.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is the traditional sweet-tart element with game and is still sold; if unavailable, a tart apple or cranberry jelly serves better than a sugary jam. Start with a tablespoon.
- AlcoholNeither sauce is cooked long enough to drive off much of the wine, and the goose sauce is barely heated at all. Worth knowing if you are serving anyone who avoids alcohol.
Both of these belong to the nineteenth-century British repertoire of wine-and-fruit sauces for roast birds and game, which American hotel kitchens inherited wholesale along with the roast-and-carve service that made them necessary. The bread-thickened version for hare is the older idea of the two: cooks bodied out a sauce with soaked crumb, and the same technique survives in bread sauce and in Spanish and Italian nut-and-bread sauces. Currant jelly with game is a pairing generally traced to English practice and it stuck fast in America, where it turns up beside everything from roast hare to Thanksgiving turkey. The port-and-mustard sauce for goose is the plainer trick, relying on mustard's sharpness and the wine's acidity to cut through a bird that renders a great deal of fat; that Oscar keeps it to four ingredients and one temperature instruction is a fair sample of how his book handles the classics.