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Wine Sauce for Meats
To three-fourths of a pound of butter, add one and a half pints of jelly, three-fourths cupful of sugar (brown is the best), and a tablespoonful of ground allspice, one quart of port wine; stew until thick. This is very nice with venison- Twenty-four ripe tomatoes.
Eight onions.
Six peppers.
A sweet, spiced port reduction of the sort served with venison and other dark game. Note that the entry as printed runs into the ingredient list of a different recipe partway through.
- The text breaks offEverything from "Twenty-four ripe tomatoes" onward appears to belong to another recipe, seemingly the opening of a tomato and pepper mixture whose heading is missing. The wine sauce ends at "very nice with venison."
- Quantities in modern termsThree-fourths of a pound of butter is 3 sticks, about 340 g. A pint and a half of jelly is 3 cups; a quart of port is 4 cups. This makes a large batch.
- Which jellyUnspecified in the original; currant jelly was the usual choice with game. Crabapple or quince would not be out of place; grape jelly will read as much sweeter.
- A coffee-cupIn the stray tomato line, a coffee-cup is not the standard measuring cup; equivalences given in books of the era vary and cannot be pinned down. Do not treat that fragment as a workable recipe.
- The hinge is the reduction"Stew until thick" means simmering uncovered until the mixture reduces and coats a spoon; at this volume that will take a considerable while. Undercooked, it tastes raw and boozy; taken too far, the sugar and jelly will set hard as the sauce cools.
- AllspiceA full tablespoon of ground allspice is assertive by current standards. Add half, taste after the sauce has reduced, and adjust — the flavor concentrates along with everything else.
- Butter separationWith this much butter against jelly and wine, the sauce will break if boiled hard or left to stand. Keep it at a bare simmer and whisk before serving.
- Serving and keepingAllow a couple of tablespoons per portion alongside venison, duck or roast lamb. Refrigerated it will firm up and needs gentle rewarming to loosen.
Sweet fruit-and-wine sauces for game descend from a long English tradition in which venison arrived at table with currant jelly, and the jelly was in turn cooked down with port into something closer to a sauce than a condiment. The pairing rests on the meat itself: wild venison is lean, dark and faintly livery, and cooks have long answered it with sugar, acid and warm spice rather than the pan gravy that suits beef. The recipe assumes both port and jelly were simply on hand. The presence of the stray tomato relish ingredients at the end may be a reminder of how such compilations were assembled — contributed recipes set in dense columns, with headings and line breaks perhaps lost along the way — though that is guesswork.