No. 435

Bigarde Sauce

Sauce a la Bigarade

A bigarade orange is a sour orange before it changes to an orange color; peel it without touching the white parts, using a peeling knife (Fig. 156), cut the peel up into small fine Julienne, plunge it into boiling water, and cook it until it is tender; drain and enclose it in a covered saucepan with four gills of espagnole (No. 414) or veloute (No. 415) if needed for a white sauce. Just when ready to serve, finish the sauce with a dash of cayenne pepper, meat glaze, the orange juice and the juice of a lemon; strained through a tammy, adding two ounces of fine butter. The bigarade can be replaced by an orange and a lemon, using the peel and juice of both fruits.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic bitter-orange sauce for duck, built on a finished brown or white mother sauce. The whole thing hinges on the last minute: once the butter and citrus juice go in, the sauce must not boil.

Four gillsA gill is half a cup, so four gills is two cups (about 475 ml) of espagnole or veloute.
The bigarade orangeA bigarade is the bitter Seville orange, sold in winter and often labelled marmalade orange. This recipe specifies it while still green-skinned and sharply sour. The recipe's own substitution is the practical one: use the peel and juice of one ordinary orange plus one lemon, which supplies the missing acidity.
Peel without the whiteTake only the coloured zest with a swivel peeler or paring knife. Any pith carried into the julienne turns the finished sauce bitter in a way blanching will not fix.
Blanching the julienneCut the zest into hair-fine strips and boil until tender. Some cooks change the water once for Seville peel, which is more bitter than sweet orange. Drain well before it goes into the sauce.
Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon of demi-glace or a well-reduced homemade veal stock does the same job; commercial bouillon paste is too salty at this concentration.
TammyA tammy was a woven cloth the sauce was wrung through. A fine chinois or a sieve lined with damp muslin is the modern equivalent. Note the sequence problem in the original: if you strain after adding the julienne you will remove it, so strain the sauce first, then return the zest, then mount the butter.
Finishing off the heatAdd the two ounces (55 g) of cold butter in pieces off the burner, swirling until glossy. Boiling after this point splits the emulsion and cooks the raw brightness out of the citrus juice.
SeasoningA dash of cayenne means a pinch, not a teaspoon; it should register as warmth behind the orange rather than heat. Add the lemon juice last and taste, since the sharpness of the fruit varies.

A Little History

Sauce bigarade belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of orange sauces for duck, of which canard a l'orange is the surviving descendant, and it takes its name from the bigarade, the bitter orange itself, from Provencal bigarrada — the tree, the bigaradier, is named from the fruit rather than the other way round. Bitter oranges reached the Mediterranean centuries before sweet ones, and cooks long treated their juice as an acid seasoning in the way lemon or verjuice was used, which is why the sauce reads as sharp rather than sweet; there is no sugar in it at all. Ranhofer's placement of the recipe among the hot sauces is characteristic of The Epicurean (1894), which organises Delmonico's kitchen as a system of numbered cross-references: the sauce is not a standalone formula but a derivative, assembled in minutes from espagnole or veloute already standing on the stove. The note that a plain orange and a lemon may replace the bigarade suggests — though this is inference rather than anything Ranhofer says — that even a New York kitchen of that scale could not always get the right fruit.