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Currant Sauce for Sucking Pig or Venison
Wash and pick one ounce of dried currants. Boil in half a pint of water for a few minutes, and pour them over a cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Let them soak for a while. Beat them well with a fork, and stir them into a cupful of good melted butter. Add two table spoonfuls of the brown gravy made for the pig, a glass of port, and a pinch of salt. Stir the sauce over the fire until it is quite smooth. Sometimes currants are simply washed and dried, and sent in on a dish with the pig. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d. per pint, exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for a small pig.
A bread-thickened sweet-sharp sauce in the old English manner, closer to a sauce for game than to anything on a modern table. Two of its terms mean something other than what they appear to.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn Victorian cookery "melted butter" is the standard flour-thickened butter sauce rather than simply liquid butter. Proportions vary between authorities, but roughly an ounce each of butter and flour cooked together and thinned with about half a pint of water or stock is typical. A cupful of plain liquid butter will give you a broken, greasy sauce. If you skip it, use a thin béchamel or a light roux-thickened gravy instead.
- CurrantsDried currants here are Zante currants — small dried grapes, sold as such — not redcurrants or blackcurrants. One ounce is about 3 tablespoons. Washing and picking mattered when dried fruit arrived with grit and stems in it; modern packaged currants need only a rinse.
- A glass of portA wine glass in this period is 2 to 2½ fl oz. Use a tawny or ruby port; the sauce needs its sweetness as well as its body.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, not 8. Cassell's measures throughout are imperial.
- Bread-crumbsFinely grated crumbs from stale white bread, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and turn the sauce pasty. Add them gradually and judge the thickness — a cupful may be more than you want.
- The brown gravyThe two spoonfuls of pan gravy from the roast are what tie the sauce to the meat. Without a roast in progress, a well-reduced brown stock does the same work; without either, the sauce reads as sweet pudding.
- FinishingKeep it below a simmer once the port is in, and stir until smooth — a few minutes, not the half hour quoted, which covers the whole operation including soaking the currants. Rub through a sieve if the crumbs stay visible.
- Yield"Sufficient for a small pig," with the cost quoted per pint, suggests roughly a pint of sauce, to serve with roast pork, venison, or duck.
Sauces built on bread and dried fruit are among the oldest survivals in English cookery, descending from the medieval habit of thickening with bread rather than flour and of pairing roast meat with something sweet and sharp. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the later nineteenth century, sucking pig was already a display dish rather than an everyday one, and its traditional accompaniments were kept up largely because the dish itself was ceremonial. The alternative given at the end, currants simply washed and sent to table on a dish, is the plainer usage. Note the costing: sixpence a pint is given "exclusive of the wine," so the price of the port is not counted in the estimate.