Home › The Principles of Cookery › GRAVY FOR ROAST VENISON (another way)
GRAVY FOR ROAST VENISON (another way)
Boil a quarter of a pint of good French vinegar with two ounces of pounded loaf sugar, and as soon as the latter is dissolved, pour it into a tureen. A well-tinned saucepan should be used in making this gravy. Time, three or four minutes. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A sweet-sour sauce rather than a gravy in the modern sense: no meat juices, no thickening, just vinegar and sugar reduced for a few minutes and sent to table hot.
- The quarter pintAn imperial quarter pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml, or a little over half a US cup. The two ounces of sugar is roughly 55 g, giving a distinctly sharp syrup.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in hard cones, broken and pounded as needed. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is the direct replacement; it dissolves faster, so watch that the vinegar does not reduce too far.
- Why the tinned pan mattersHot vinegar attacks bare copper, iron and aluminium, picking up metallic flavour and, with copper, worse. A tin lining was the Victorian answer; today use stainless steel, enamelled cast iron or glass.
- French vinegarThis most likely means wine vinegar, white or red, milder than the malt vinegar of an English kitchen. Cider vinegar is an acceptable stand-in; malt or distilled white will taste crude here.
- Three or four minutesThe timing is only as long as it takes the sugar to dissolve and the mixture to come to a boil. Longer boiling would concentrate it into a stickier syrup.
- Serve hotPoured straight into a tureen, as a sharp accompaniment rather than a roasting gravy. Five fluid ounces divided among four or five people is about two tablespoons each.
Venison has been paired with sweet-sharp accompaniments in English cookery for centuries, from the medieval taste for vinegar-and-sugar sauces through to the port and redcurrant jelly of the nineteenth-century table. The logic is that lean, gamey meat with little fat of its own wants acidity and sweetness rather than a rich pan sauce. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later Victorian decades, prints more than one version of the sauce; this one, at twopence, is the plainest possible form of that tradition, stripped of the wine, jelly and spice that a grander kitchen would have added.