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Vinegar Sauce for Venison
Put half a pint of vinegar into a well-tinned and perfectly-clean saucepan, together with four ounces of pounded loaf sugar; simmer the sauce gently till the sugar is dissolved, remove the scum as it rises, strain through a napkin, and serve in a tureen.
A two-ingredient sweet-sour sauce of the kind served hot alongside roast venison in place of, or beside, redcurrant jelly. The only real technical demand is a pan that will not react with hot vinegar.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial half-pint: 10 fl oz, or about 284 ml (a shade over a US cup). With 4 oz (115 g) sugar it makes something over a cup of finished sauce, enough to give a tablespoon or two each to a table of eight or more.
- The pan is the hinge"Well-tinned" is the period way of saying non-reactive. Hot vinegar attacks copper, iron and untinned brass, giving a metallic taste and a grey cast. Use stainless steel, enamelled cast iron or glass; avoid bare aluminium.
- Loaf sugarCone or loaf sugar was the refined sugar of the period, broken off and pounded in a mortar. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent; caster dissolves faster still.
- Which vinegarThe recipe just says "vinegar"; malt was the common British household vinegar of the period and is the likeliest intention. Cider or red wine vinegar both work and are gentler; a very strong vinegar will read as harsh at this sugar ratio.
- Simmer, do not reduceThe instruction is only to dissolve the sugar, which takes a few minutes at most. Boiling hard drives off vinegar as vapour, sharpens the kitchen air and leaves a thicker, sweeter syrup than intended.
- Skimming and strainingPeriod sugar and vinegar left more residue than modern equivalents, so there was something to skim; modern granulated throws almost none. Straining through a napkin is likewise a refinement step you can skip, or replace with a fine sieve if the vinegar is cloudy.
- ServingSend it out hot in a warmed jug or small tureen with roast haunch or saddle. It also keeps several weeks refrigerated in a sealed jar and reheats without harm.
Sweet-sour accompaniments to venison are very old in British cookery: the medieval and Tudor kitchen served game with vinegar-and-sugar or vinegar-and-fruit sauces long before redcurrant jelly became the standard nineteenth-century partner. The logic is that venison is lean, dark and strongly flavoured, and acid with sugar cuts it in a way that a fat-based sauce does not. The insistence on a "well-tinned and perfectly-clean" pan is a reminder of how much period cookery ran on tinned copper, and how quickly worn tinning turned an acidic sauce into something inedible.