Wine Sauce
Put four tablespoons butter in a sauce-pan, brown richly; add five tablespoons flour and continue browning, stirring constantly. Pour on slowly one and one-half cups Brown Stock. Heat to boiling point and add one-third cup Madeira Wine and one-third cup currant jelly previously whipped. When jelly is well blended with sauce, strain and serve piping hot.
A brown-roux sauce sharpened with Madeira and currant jelly, meant for game, venison, roast ham or a beef tenderloin. It comes together in about fifteen minutes, and the only difficult part is the browning.
- The hinge: brown the roux slowlyButter browned "richly" and then cooked further with flour is a dark roux made in fat that burns easily. Keep the heat at medium or below and stir constantly; the moment it smells acrid rather than nutty it is finished, and there is no rescuing it.
- Roux ratioFour tablespoons butter to five tablespoons flour thickening only 1 1/2 cups stock is a stiff proportion by modern standards. Expect a heavy, coating sauce; thin with additional stock if you want something nearer a jus.
- Brown StockThe capitalisation points to the book's own stock recipe, a long-simmered brown meat stock. A good unsalted beef or veal stock stands in. Avoid salted commercial broth, since reducing it with jelly will push it over.
- MadeiraUse a dry-ish Sercial or Verdelho, or a Rainwater. So-called cooking Madeira from the supermarket is salted and will ruin the balance. Add it off a hard boil so the aromatics survive, and give it a minute or two to lose the raw alcohol edge.
- "Currant jelly previously whipped"Red currant jelly beaten with a fork or whisk in a separate bowl until it breaks from a set gel into a smooth pourable state. Whipping it first is what lets it disperse evenly rather than sitting in lumps.
- StrainingThe strain catches flour lumps and any undissolved jelly. Push it through a fine sieve rather than pouring, and hold the sauce over hot water if it must wait, since a dark roux sauce skins quickly.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside a roast.
Elizabeth O. Hiller's Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners (1913) was built around the American middle-class ritual of the large Sunday midday meal, and a wine sauce like this would suit the seasons when game and roast meats came to the table. The combination of a brown sauce with Madeira and red currant jelly is usually traced to the French sauces of the nineteenth-century professional kitchen by way of Anglo-American cookbooks, in which currant jelly is often said to have been the standard accompaniment to venison and mutton; adding it to the sauce rather than passing it separately is the simplifying move. Madeira is generally held to have had a particular place in American cooking well into the twentieth century, being commonly described as the fortified wine of choice in the eastern states since the colonial trade, and it seems to have survived in the kitchen as a flavoring long after fashion had moved on from drinking it.