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Sweet Sauce, for Venison
Dissolve two table-spoonfuls of red currant jelly, and stir into it a glassful of port or claret. Do not let the sauce boil. Or stir two or three good-sized lumps of sugar into a quarter of a pint of venison gravy until dissolved. Add a large glassful of port or claret, and serve.
Two versions of the same idea: a sweet, wine-sharpened sauce to cut the leanness of venison. Both are five-minute jobs, and the only real technique is heat control.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe says so of the jelly version. The point of the wine here is its fruit and aroma, and a boil drives both off. Warm the sauce only until the jelly or sugar has dissolved and it steams faintly.
- A glassfulIn Victorian cookery books a glassful generally means a wine glass, conventionally about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup). The "large glassful" of the second version is simply larger; the book does not say by how much.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz -- 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon in American cups.
- Lumps of sugarA Victorian lump was cut from a sugar loaf and varied; reckon each "good-sized" lump as about a teaspoon. Two or three lumps in 5 fl oz of gravy is a light sweetening, not a syrup.
- Venison gravyThe pan juices or roasting-tin drippings from the joint, deglazed and strained -- not a thickened flour gravy. If you have none, a well-reduced dark stock stands in, though the sauce will be thinner in flavour.
- Port or claretClaret means red Bordeaux, or any dry, moderately tannic red. Port gives the sweeter, rounder result and pairs better with the jelly version; a dry red suits the gravy version, where the sugar is doing the sweetening.
Sweet-sour sauces for game are long-standing in English cookery -- medieval kitchens served venison with vinegar-and-spice sauces, and sweet fruit accompaniments became common as sugar grew cheaper. Red currant jelly was a usual accompaniment to venison, hare and mutton in Victorian houses. The two variants here suit different situations: the jelly-and-wine sauce needs nothing but store-cupboard ingredients, while the gravy version assumes you have roasted the joint yourself. Venison at this date was more often a gift from a country estate than a market purchase.