Home › Entrées › Three Mushrooms (Teaspoonful of Red Currant)
Three Mushrooms (Teaspoonful of Red Currant)
A teaspoonful of Red Currant Jelly.
Cook all these ingredients together until reduced to half the quantity, stir well, and skim well; pass through a tammy, let it boil up again, skim if necessary, and pour over the hare.
What survives here is the tail end of a game sauce, printed without its ingredient list — the title's "three mushrooms" and the currant jelly are all that remain of it. Treat the text as a method for finishing a brown sauce for hare rather than as a complete recipe.
- The missing ingredients"All these ingredients" refers to a list that does not appear on this page. What it contained cannot be recovered: the surviving line names only the currant jelly, and the page title offers no reliable guide. Since the quantities cannot honestly be reconstructed, use a modern civet or poivrade sauce as the base and adopt the finishing method below.
- TammyA tammy is a fine worsted or woollen straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A conical fine-mesh strainer, or a sieve lined with damp muslin, does the same work; press the solids with a ladle rather than twisting.
- Reduced to halfThis is the hinge of the instruction. Reduce at a bare simmer, uncovered, and judge by volume in the pan rather than by time — the sauce should coat a spoon lightly, not sit on it. Once past half it turns salty and sticky very quickly.
- Skim wellSkimming twice, before and after straining, is not fussiness: game stocks throw a good deal of fat and albumen, and the scum carries the muddy flavour. Draw the pan half off the heat so the fat gathers on the cool side.
- Red currant jellyA teaspoonful is a seasoning, not a sweetener; it adds acid and gloss and rounds off the iron edge of hare. Note that in the original the jelly is one of the ingredients cooked and reduced with the rest, not a late addition. Commercial jellies vary in sugar, so taste before adding more.
- Boiling up againThe second boil is there to reunite the sauce after straining and to catch any last scum. Keep it brief. Prolonged boiling after the jelly goes in dulls the fruit and can break a sauce enriched with butter.
Hare with red currant jelly is one of the fixed points of British and French game cookery, and the pairing of a dark, long-reduced sauce with a spoonful of tart fruit jelly is the same logic that puts cranberry with turkey or rowan jelly with venison: acid and a little sugar cut the strong, gamey, mineral quality of dark meat. The page assumes a reader who already has a base sauce to hand, so it wastes no words on it and concentrates on the finishing -- reduce, skim, strain, boil up, pour over. Hare was long a familiar dish in kitchens supplied from an estate or a game dealer, arriving in fur, and it appears far less often on British menus today.