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Unusual Meat Sauce
Mix together two tablespoonfuls of brown sugar, a teaspoonful of grated chocolate, half a cupful of preserved currants, a tablespoonful of shredded orange peel, and the same amount of capers.
Pour over these ingredients a cupful of vinegar and let stand for several hours; before serving strain off any extra vinegar.
An uncooked sweet-sour relish for cold roast beef, ham, tongue or game. Nothing is heated, so the only real work is getting the balance right and giving it time.
- The hinge: let it macerate, then drainThe several hours of standing softens the orange peel and lets the sugar dissolve into the vinegar; the grated chocolate will stay largely suspended rather than dissolving. Straining off the excess at the end gives something closer to a spoonable relish than a thin pickle.
- Grated chocolateHistorically 'chocolate' in this sense generally meant a plain, unsweetened block, grated on a fine grater. Use unsweetened or very high-percentage chocolate, finely grated; a teaspoon of modern sweetened chips will read as candy.
- Preserved currantsMost likely currants put up in syrup rather than dried Zante currants. A thick currant preserve is the closest match; redcurrant jelly will work but gives a smoother, more jellied result, and dried currants a chunkier one.
- Shredded orange peelProbably candied peel cut into fine shreds, though fresh peel shredded fine is also possible. Fresh zest works but is sharper and adds no sweetness, so taste before adding more sugar.
- The vinegarA cupful is a lot of liquid for this quantity of solids, and the recipe has you pour off the surplus. Cider or red wine vinegar is gentler here than distilled white, which at this proportion is punishing.
- CapersDrain and rinse them first. Capers packed in brine or salt can be very salty, and an unrinsed tablespoonful can dominate the whole sauce.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly three-quarters of a cup of drained sauce, enough for four to six servings alongside cold meat. Covered in the refrigerator it keeps a week or more; the acid and sugar do the preserving.
Sweet-sour sauces built on dried or preserved fruit, vinegar, citrus peel and a little chocolate belong to a long European tradition of agrodolce condiments for boiled and roasted meats — the chocolate is used for a bitter, savoury note rather than for sweetness, a trick generally traced to Italian and Spanish cookery and still visible in dishes like Sicilian sauces for game and in mole. What makes it worth noting is that a relish needing nothing but a bowl and a few hours' waiting asks nothing of the stove. Cold sliced roast on hot days was a domestic staple long before home refrigeration was universal, and these vinegar-based sauces did double duty, brightening meat that was a day or two old and disguising the flatness that chilling gives to fat and gravy.