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Port Wine Sauce
Fry an onion in butter with a bouquet garni, add a pint of rich thick stock, boil and skim. Strain, add a dessert-spoonful of red currant jelly, and a glass of port wine. Boil up again, and serve. This is a favourite accompaniment to roast wild duck.
A short brown sauce of the classic English game-service type: fried aromatics, reduced stock, jelly for sweetness, port for depth. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes once the stock is on hand.
- Add the port last and brieflyThe instruction to "boil up again" means exactly that — bring it back to the boil and take it off. Long boiling after the wine goes in drives off the fruit and aroma and leaves a flat, faintly stewed taste; a minute or two is enough to lose the raw alcohol edge.
- The stock is the whole sauce"Rich thick stock" means a well-reduced brown stock or demi-glace with enough gelatine to coat a spoon on its own. Ordinary supermarket broth will give you thin purple liquid. If your stock is weak, reduce it hard before you start rather than trying to thicken at the end.
- MeasuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 2½ cups. A dessert-spoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon 2 teaspoons of jelly. A "glass" of port in this period usually means a small wine glass, roughly 2 to 3 fl oz; the exact amount was left to taste and still can be.
- Bouquet garniParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or bundled in a scrap of muslin. Tie it to the pan handle so it comes out cleanly at the straining stage.
- Which portA ruby or a young tawny. Vintage port is wasted here, and the sweeter reserve styles will push the sauce over the top given the jelly already in it.
- SkimmingSkim while the stock is at a bare tremble on one side of the pan rather than a rolling boil — fat and scum collect on the still surface and lift off in one go.
- Yield and finishingA pint of stock makes roughly enough for six to eight servings. A knob of cold butter swirled in off the heat will add gloss; it is not in the original and the sauce stands without it.
- Beyond wild duckThe same sauce suits venison, roast pigeon, hare and any dark-fleshed game bird. With farmed duck, which is fattier and milder, cut the jelly back or the sauce reads as sweet.
Sweetened wine sauces for game are very old in English cooking — medieval and Tudor kitchens served venison and wildfowl with sharp-sweet sauces built on wine, vinegar and spice — but the particular pairing of port and red currant jelly belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Portuguese fortified wine was the standard English red and currant jelly was a common store-cupboard item. The wild duck reference is not decorative. Widgeon and mallard have a strong, faintly livery flesh that the sweetness and acidity are there to cut, the same logic that puts redcurrant on the side of the venison plate to this day.