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Currant Jelly Sauce (To Brown Sauce add one half)
To Brown Sauce add one half cup currant jelly, one teaspoon lemon juice and a few drops onion juice. Boil five minutes and serve.
A derivative sauce: it assumes you already have a pan of the book's brown sauce standing by, and adds three things to it. The whole job takes five minutes once the base exists.
- The base is the recipeIt assumes a pan of the book's brown sauce is already made and seasoned. The recipe gives no quantity for that base, so the ratio of jelly to sauce is left to the cook; half a cup of jelly is meant to sweeten and sharpen a saucepan's worth, not to make a jam.
- Currant jelly means red currantNot black currant, and not the dried Zante "currants" sold for baking, which are grapes. Red currant jelly is tart and sets firmly; if you cannot find it, a tart jelly of similar acidity behaves the same way, but sweeter preserves will flatten the sauce.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: a peeled onion grated on a fine grater and the pulp squeezed, or the cut face scraped, giving juice without any solids. A few drops is genuinely a few drops ot a spoonful.
- Boil five minutes, and mean itThe jelly has to dissolve completely and the sauce has to come back to a coating consistency after the added liquid. Stir throughout, since sugar on the bottom of the pan scorches quickly and the sauce is already brown enough to hide it.
- Add the lemon last if you canA teaspoon of lemon juice is there to keep the jelly from reading as dessert. Boiling dulls it slightly, so taste at the end and add a few more drops if the sauce tastes flabby.
- StrainIf the jelly leaves any skin or fruit fragments, pass the finished sauce through a fine strainer. A glossy, unbroken surface is the whole point of a sauce like this.
- Yield and servingServing -- It is a sauce for venison, mutton, roast lamb, game birds and ham, nothing delicate. The recipe states no yield; it makes as much as the pan of brown sauce it starts from, plus the jelly.
Sweetened, fruited brown sauces for game are old European kitchen practice, and the pairing of red currant with venison and mutton runs through nineteenth-century English and American cookery alike ow many cousins work from the same idea that a tart jelly cuts the richness and slight muskiness of dark meat. What is characteristic of a book like Lowney's is the structure rather than the flavour: the sauce chapter sets down one mother sauce and then lists its offspring in a line or two apiece, exactly as a professional kitchen would, which lets a household cook of the early 1900s build a repertoire from a single pan of brown sauce.