Home › Sauces › Cayenne Pepper (When the poivrade sauce)
Cayenne Pepper (When the poivrade sauce)
When the poivrade sauce is boiling stir in the red currant jelly, the port wine, and a little cayenne. Let it boil about ten minutes, strain, and it is ready for use. ८
This is the closing stage of a larger preparation: a finished poivrade is being turned into the sweet-sharp brown sauce served with venison and other game. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat the proportions below as the conventional ones rather than as anything stated in the book.
- What poivrade isA brown sauce built on a mirepoix and trimmings, sharpened with vinegar and finished with a heavy hand of crushed peppercorns. It is a made sauce in its own right and must exist before this instruction can be followed; there is no shortcut hidden in these three lines.
- Quantities are absentThe book gives no measurements at all. As a rough modern guide, something like 2 tablespoons of red currant jelly and 4 tablespoons of port to a pint of poivrade is a workable starting point, but no such ratio is fixed by the book or by classical texts; start low, taste, and add — jelly in particular can tip the sauce into confectionery quickly.
- The ten-minute boilThis is not idle simmering. It boils off much of the raw alcohol in the port and reduces the sauce back to coating consistency after two liquid additions. If it is still thin at ten minutes, keep going rather than thickening with starch.
- Cayenne, not black pepperThe poivrade already carries its peppercorn heat. The cayenne is added for a different, sharper burn at the back of the palate, and a large pinch is enough for a pint. It cannot be taken out again.
- Strain properlyPass through a fine chinois or a sieve lined with muslin, pressing the solids to extract the sauce rather than pushing them through. The point is to leave behind the crushed peppercorn husks and mirepoix debris.
- ServingA pint of finished sauce serves eight to ten with roast venison, hare, or a saddle of mutton. Hold it in a bain-marie; if it must be reheated, do so gently, as a hard second boil will dull the port.
Sauce poivrade is one of the older members of the French brown-sauce family, named simply for its pepper — poivre — and traditionally made with the trimmings of the game it will accompany. The addition of red currant jelly and port, as here, gives it the sweet-and-sour finish long associated with game. The jelly-and-port pairing runs right through Victorian and Edwardian cookery, from this sauce to the cold Cumberland sauce served with ham and boar's head. The entry appears here as three lines with no measurements, assuming a cook who already had a poivrade on the stove and needed only to be told how it was finished for the game course.