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Hare, Wine Sauce For
Take three table-spoonfuls of good unflavoured gravy. Mix with it three table-spoonfuls of claret, put it on the fire, and stir into it one table-spoonful of red currant jelly. When quite hot, serve as quickly as possible. The sauce will be much improved if two cloves and a tiny piece of stick cinnamon are boiled in it for a few minutes before the gravy is added, then strained off.
A three-ingredient pan sauce written in tablespoons, which tells you it was meant as an accompaniment poured over a couple of servings of roast or jugged hare rather than passed around a table. Everything hinges on the quality of the gravy, since there is nothing else to hide behind.
- Yield and scalingAs written this makes about seven tablespoons, just under half a cup, enough for two or three portions. It scales up cleanly in the same proportions, three parts gravy to three parts wine to one part jelly.
- "Unflavoured gravy"Most likely plain brown stock or the reduced pan juices from the roast, with no herbs, onion or vinegar in it, so the wine and spice carry the flavour. A good unsalted veal or game stock reduced to a light glaze works. The recipe says nothing either way about whether the gravy is thickened.
- ClaretNineteenth-century British shorthand for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red with firm acidity and no oak sweetness will do; avoid jammy high-alcohol reds, which fight the currant jelly.
- Order of operationsIf you use the spices, simmer the cloves and cinnamon in the wine alone for a few minutes and strain before the gravy goes in. Two cloves is the right restraint here; clove takes over a sauce this small very quickly.
- The jellyRedcurrant jelly is the classic partner to hare and venison. Stir it in off the heat or over low heat until just dissolved, and taste before adding salt, since jelly brands vary widely in sweetness.
- Do not reduce after mixing"When quite hot, serve as quickly as possible" is the instruction that matters. Held or boiled down, the sauce turns sticky from the sugar in the jelly and loses the wine aroma the spices were meant to lift.
- ConsistencyNothing thickens this but the body of the stock. If you want it to coat rather than pool, reduce the stock further before combining, or finish with a knob of cold butter swirled in off the heat.
- ServingWarm the sauceboat. A sauce this thin chills fast against a plate of hot roast meat.
Wine-and-redcurrant sauces for hare and venison belong to a long British and northern European habit of pairing dark game with something sweet and sharp, a taste that survived from the heavily spiced sweet-sour sauces of medieval cookery long after sugar and spice had left most savoury dishes. Cassell's arranges these short formulas alphabetically under the meat they serve, so a household cook working through a hare could find the roasting, the jugging and the sauce in one place. The reliance on "good unflavoured gravy" reflects a kitchen that kept stock going as a matter of routine; the spice infusion, strained off before the gravy is added, shows the period's fondness for flavour that can be tasted but not seen. Claret is often said to have been a familiar presence on the English middle-class table by the late nineteenth century, though how everyday it really was is uncertain; at any rate it was within reach of a household that could spare three spoonfuls for a sauce.