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Port-Wine Sauce
Make a rich brown sauce from the liquor in which the game was cooked, thickened with browned flour and seasoned well. Add a tablespoonful of mushroom catsup, a tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, half an onion minced fine, a spring of parsley, half a bay leaf, a blade of mace, and a glass of port wine. Simmer all together fifteen or twenty minutes, and strain.
A classic finishing sauce for roast or braised game, built on the pan liquor rather than stock. The single thing that matters is restraint with the port: it goes in near the end and should simmer only long enough to lose its raw edge.
- A glass of portIn books of this period a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though some writers use it loosely for a half-cup. Start at 2 fl oz for roughly a cup of sauce and taste before adding more; the measurement is genuinely imprecise.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a low oven until nut-coloured. It thickens noticeably less than raw flour, so allow about half again as much, and expect the colour to come largely from the browning rather than from long reduction.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. It was a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract used as an umami seasoning. Mushroom ketchup is still sold in Britain; failing that, a teaspoon of soy or a spoonful of strained mushroom soaking liquor with a pinch of salt stands in.
- Blade of maceA single piece of the dried lacy aril from nutmeg, removed at straining. Roughly an eighth of a teaspoon of ground mace, added at the end, gives a similar effect without the woody edge.
- The game liquorIf a roast has left only a spoonful of pan juices, deglaze with a little stock and use that. The sauce depends on the roasting residue for depth; plain water thickened with flour will taste of flour.
- Simmer, do not boilFifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer softens the onion and marries the spices, as the recipe directs. A hard boil will drive off the port's aroma.
- After strainingWhisk in a knob of cold butter off the heat if the sauce looks dull; it will gloss and round out the acidity from the two bottled sauces.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity for the game liquor, so the finished yield cannot be worked out from the text; it is a small quantity of sauce, for venison, hare, duck or any dark game bird.
Port-wine sauce belongs to the nineteenth-century English game table, where fortified wine, spice and a dark thickened gravy were common accompaniments to venison and wild birds. Its bones are French — a brown sauce enriched and strained — but the mushroom catsup and Worcestershire give it an Anglo-American cast: both were available as bottled seasonings that let a household cook build savoury depth without a day of stockmaking. Mushroom catsup is the older of the two, and was made at home as well as bought; its near-disappearance from American kitchens is one reason a recipe like this now reads as more obscure than it is.