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Currant Jelly Sauce
To Brown Sauce (for recipe see Page 82) add one-half cup black or red currant jelly whipped with a fork, one teaspoon lemon juice and a few gratings of onion. Heat to boiling point, boil three minutes and serve in sauce boat. Onion may be omitted.
A short derivative sauce that depends entirely on the brown sauce beneath it. Two things decide whether it works: the quality of that base and not overcooking the jelly.
- The base sauce"Brown Sauce" in a book of this vintage generally means a roux-based espagnole or a simplified pan gravy built on browned flour and stock; the recipe does not say how much, so check page 82. If you are not making the book's version, use a well-reduced beef or veal stock thickened with a brown roux; a thin stock will not carry the jelly.
- Whip the jelly firstBeating the jelly with a fork breaks the set so it dissolves evenly instead of sitting in lumps that scorch on the pan bottom. Do this off the heat, in a bowl, before it goes anywhere near the sauce.
- Three minutes and no moreThe boil is there to marry the jelly and drive off rawness, not to reduce. Longer and the sugar concentrates, the sauce turns sticky and candy-sweet, and the fruit flavour flattens.
- A few gratings of onionGrated on the fine side of a box grater so you get juice and pulp rather than pieces; the recipe does not quantify it. It reads as savoury depth, not onion. The recipe itself notes that the onion may be omitted.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly is still widely sold; black currant is easier to find as jam or preserve, which brings seeds and skins. Strain a preserve before using it, or the sauce will not be smooth.
- Lemon juiceOne teaspoon is not optional seasoning here. It is what stops half a cup of jelly reading as dessert. Note that the recipe adds it with the jelly, before the boil; jellies vary a good deal in sugar, so taste and adjust.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends on how much brown sauce you begin with, which this recipe does not state. It is a sauce for roast lamb, mutton, venison or game birds, and the sauce boat matters because the sauce sets slightly as it cools and wants to be poured warm.
Sweet-tart fruit sauces with roast meat are one of the oldest habits in English cookery, surviving from a medieval taste for combining sugar, acid and spice with flesh long after most other dishes had turned savoury. By the nineteenth century that habit had narrowed to a few fixed pairings, currant jelly with mutton, lamb and game among the most durable, and Escoffier-era professional kitchens are often said to have treated it as a small "brown" derivative sauce built on espagnole, though the classic codified pairings are cold Cumberland and the venison sauces that use redcurrant jelly. Its brevity here is a sign of the period's method: the entry is three lines long and points the reader back to page 82. Red currants were also a standard kitchen-garden fruit in Britain and the northern United States, so the jelly was a pantry staple rather than a purchase, at least until currant cultivation was restricted in parts of the United States in the early twentieth century over its role in white pine blister rust.