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Sauce Chasseur
(Sauce for Venison.) Ingredients.
One pint of good brown Sauce.
Two ounces of Red Currant Jelly.
One ounce of Glaze.
A few drops of Lemon Juice, One gill of Port Wine.
A little Cayenne.
Boil all these ingredients together till reduced to half a pint, then strain and serve.
A short reduction sauce built on three things a Victorian professional kitchen always had standing by: espagnole, meat glaze and red currant jelly. If you have those, it takes fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: reduce, then tasteA pint of brown sauce plus a gill of port comes down to half a pint, so everything concentrates sharply, including the salt already present in the brown sauce and the glaze. Season only at the very end, and add the cayenne a pinch at a time once the sauce is at its final volume.
- Good brown sauceThis means sauce espagnole — a brown roux slackened with brown stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. A well-reduced homemade veal or game stock, lightly thickened, does the same job; a packet gravy will not, as it is mostly salt and colouring and will turn harsh when halved.
- GlazeGlace de viande: stock boiled down until it sets to a rubbery, dark jelly. One ounce is roughly two tablespoons. It is available commercially in tubs; the set jelly from beneath the fat of a good stock is far weaker and will not do the same work ounce for ounce.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, five fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup. Use a ruby or tawny port you would drink; the wine is a fifth of what goes into the pan and cheap cooking port shows.
- Red currant jellyTwo ounces is roughly two to three tablespoons. It should dissolve completely — whisk while the sauce comes to the boil rather than leaving a lump to sit on the bottom and scorch.
- StrainingPass it through a fine conical strainer or a double thickness of muslin, which catches any undissolved jelly and any skin formed during the reduction.
- YieldHalf a pint of finished sauce, which is ten imperial fluid ounces — enough for six to eight servings of venison, hare or roast game bird. It reheats well and sets firm in the fridge.
The name is the oddity here. Chasseur — hunter's sauce — usually means the mushroom, shallot, white wine and tomato preparation codified in French kitchens for chicken and veal, and a reader coming to this page expecting that will not find it. What is written down is a game sauce in the older British manner: espagnole sharpened with port, red currant jelly and cayenne, the same family as poivrade, Cumberland and the various "venison sauces" that fill nineteenth-century English cookery books. Red currant jelly with venison is a well-established British pairing, and by the late Victorian period the jelly pot was as fixed a part of the game course as the bread sauce was of the roast pheasant. The reliance on ready-made brown sauce and glaze suggests a professional or upper-servant's recipe: it assumes a stockpot that never goes cold and a cook who measures glaze by the ounce.