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Port Sauce
To Brown Sauce add two tablespoons butter in which have been cooked one tablespoon onion, one tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce, and one half cup Port wine.
A three-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Brown Sauce on the stove. The whole dish turns on how you treat the port and the butter.
- Cook the port down firstAdded straight to the sauce, a half cup of port thins it and leaves a raw, sharp edge. Simmer the wine on its own until reduced by about half before it goes in, then let the finished sauce barely simmer a minute or two more.
- The brown sauce baseThe book's own Brown Sauce is the foundation: browned flour and butter loosened with brown stock, cooked long enough to lose any floury taste. A good commercial demi-glace diluted with stock stands in acceptably; a packet gravy granule does not.
- Butter is a finish, not a frySweat the minced onion gently in the two tablespoons of butter until soft and translucent without colouring, then swirl butter and onion into the sauce off direct heat. Boiling hard after the butter goes in will break the emulsion and leave a greasy film.
- Mince the onion fineThe recipe gives no size, only one tablespoon, so it is measured chopped. Cut it as fine as you can manage, or strain the sauce before serving if you want it smooth in the classical manner.
- What port to useA ruby port is right here. Tawny reads nutty rather than fruity, and a very sweet port combined with Worcestershire can tip the sauce cloying against plain roast meat.
- Season at the endWorcestershire brings salt and anchovy, the reduced port brings sweetness, and the underlying stock brings more salt still. Taste only once everything is in.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity for the brown sauce base, so the yield depends on how much you start with; the additions come to a little over half a cup before reduction. It suits beef, venison, duck, mutton and game rather than delicate meats or vegetables.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and as was often the case with house cookbooks of its day it wrapped its promotional confectionery chapters in a full course of general American cookery. This sauce belongs to that general part: the compound-sauce system inherited from French professional kitchens, in which one long-cooked brown foundation is held ready and then turned into a dozen named sauces by a last-minute addition of wine, herbs or aromatics. Port and Madeira sauces are generally said to have been common partners for roast game and beef in Anglo-American dining rooms of the period, and the tablespoon of Worcestershire is the distinctly nineteenth-century Anglophone touch, a bottled sauce that had become a pantry fixture on both sides of the Atlantic and was reached for whenever a cook wanted savoury depth in a hurry.