Home › The World's Kitchen › Sauce Bigarade
Sauce Bigarade
Entirely remove the white part of the two orange rinds, then cut them in small julienne strips, place and boil in boiling water ten minutes. Drain, place in a small saucepan with two tablespoons currant jelly, half gill port wine, juice of a sound orange, one and a half gills demiglace, and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well, let reduce to half the quantity, mixing once in a while, then serve as directed.
A short reduction sauce for duck, built on demi-glace. The whole thing hinges on the zest: white pith left on the strips will turn the finished sauce bitter in a way the currant jelly cannot cover.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of port is 1/4 cup and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne about an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Two orange rinds, no pithPeel the zest off in wide strips with a vegetable peeler, then lay each strip flat and shave away any white with a knife before cutting julienne. This is the step that decides whether the sauce is fragrant or acrid.
- The ten-minute blanchBoiling the strips draws out bitterness and softens them. Drain and refresh briefly in cold water so they keep their colour and stop cooking.
- Demi-glaceThe book assumes a house stock reduced with espagnole. A good jarred demi-glace works, or reduce 1 1/2 cups of strong brown veal or duck stock to 3/4 cup. Avoid bouillon cubes; reducing them by half makes the sauce very salty.
- Reduce to halfAbout 2/3 cup finishes. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir now and then, since the currant jelly and reduced port will catch and scorch over high heat.
- Sweet orange, bitter nameA true bigarade uses the sour Seville orange. With a supermarket navel the sauce comes out sweeter, so hold back a little of the jelly and adjust with lemon juice or a splash of vinegar at the end.
- Yield and serviceRoughly 2/3 cup, enough for four portions of duck or a single roast duck carved at table. "Serve as directed" refers the cook to instructions given elsewhere in the book.
Bigarade is the French word for the bitter or Seville orange, Citrus aurantium, the fruit that goes into marmalade and, in a related variety, Curacao, and the sauce that carries its name is the classical accompaniment to roast duck, caneton a la bigarade. Bitter oranges were among the earliest citrus widely grown in Europe and were treated as a souring agent much as lemons are now; their juice and zest gave a sharpness that cut the fat of a rich bird. By the time this book was compiled, sweet oranges had become the ordinary market fruit, and recipes like this one use currant jelly and port to build back the sweet-sour balance the original fruit supplied on its own. The reliance on demi-glace suggests the professional Escoffier-era kitchen, where a single mother stock underpinned dozens of small sauces turned out to order.