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Woodcock Liver Sauce
Put two tablespoonfuls each of port wine and cullis, and the pounded bones and livers of six roasted woodcocks into a saucepan, and let the liquor simmer till of the consistency of cream; then strain, and add the strained juice of two oranges and a seasoning of pepper and salt.
A classic game sauce built on the carcasses of birds you have already roasted, which means the recipe only makes sense as the second half of a woodcock dinner. Two of its four ingredients need translation before you start.
- CullisAn anglicisation of coulis, which in nineteenth-century kitchens meant a strong brown meat stock thickened with roux and reduced — the workhorse base sauce of the professional kitchen. Commercial demi-glace or a well-reduced veal stock is the modern stand-in.
- Sourcing the birdsWoodcock cannot be bought in the United States; it is a migratory game bird and commercial sale has been prohibited since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. This is a recipe for a hunter's kitchen. Snipe, quail or squab bones and livers give a similar sauce at lower intensity.
- The livers, and the trailWoodcock were traditionally roasted undrawn, so in a period kitchen the livers would often have come to the mortar together with the trail — the intestines — which many cooks prized for flavour. If you are working with cleaned birds, reserve the livers separately before roasting.
- PoundingA mortar was the tool intended, and it does the job better than a food processor because you want the bones cracked and the marrow released, not the whole mass emulsified. Work in the port as you pound to keep it from drying out.
- Simmer, do not boilThis is the hinge. Liver proteins seize and go grainy above a bare simmer, and the sauce will separate into gritty solids and thin liquid. Keep it just trembling until it coats a spoon like cream.
- Strain properly"Then strain" means through a fine chinois or a doubled sieve, pressing hard on the debris to extract everything, then discarding the bone fragments. Anything less and you get splinters.
- The orangeAdd the juice off the heat, as written — reheating after acid goes in encourages curdling. Period recipes of this type often assumed a sharp Seville-type orange; with modern sweet oranges, a squeeze of lemon restores the intended edge.
- YieldThe finished quantity is small — a few tablespoons of reduced wine and cullis plus the juice of two oranges — enough to spoon over six roasted woodcock and their toast. It is a condiment, not a pool of gravy.
Woodcock held a peculiar rank in nineteenth-century dining: a tiny bird, roasted whole and undrawn on toast to catch the trail, and priced accordingly on American hotel menus. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) reflects a Waldorf larder that could still buy wild game in quantity from market hunters, an arrangement that ended in the United States with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the subsequent ban on commercial traffic in migratory birds. The sauce itself belongs to the older French tradition of the salmis and the pressed-carcass sauce, in which nothing of a small expensive bird is wasted: bones, liver and trail are pounded back into a fortified stock so that six birds flavor the sauce for six birds. "Cullis" is the English spelling that Anglo-American cookbooks used for coulis for well over two centuries, and its appearance here marks the recipe as a survivor from the pre-Escoffier vocabulary that Oscar's generation was still writing in.