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Sauce, Sweet (for Venison)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for small joint.-A small jar of red-currant jelly, 1 glass of port wine. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Put the above ingredients into a stewpan, set them over the fire, and, when SAUCES, RECIPES FOR. melted, pour in a tureen, and serve. I' should not be allowed to boil.
TIME.-5 minutes to meit the jelly INGREDIENTS Sauce, Tournée. for sauce for 1 entrée. -1 pint of white stock thickening of flour and butter, or white roux, a faggot of savoury herbs, including parsley, 6 chopped mushrooms, 6 green onions. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Put the stock into a stewpan with the herbs, onions and mushrooms, and let it simmer very gently for about 1/2 hour stir in sufficient thickening to make it of a proper consistency; let it boil for a few minutes, then skim off all the fat, strain and serve.
This sauce, with the addition of a little cream, is frequently called velouté.
TIME. hour.
Note. If poultry trimmings are at hand, the stock should be made of these. The above sauce should not be made too thick, as it does not then admit of the fat being nicely removed.
Two ingredients and five minutes; the only thing that can go wrong is heat. The sauce is a warm gloss, not a syrup.
- Do not let it boilBeeton's own warning is the hinge. Boiling drives off the port's aroma and takes the jelly past its set point, so it cools sticky and dull instead of pooling around the meat. Warm it over low heat only until the jelly has slumped and gone smooth.
- A small jar of jellyThe recipe gives no weight. Household preserve jars varied, so read it as somewhere around 8 oz (225 g) of red-currant jelly, enough for a sauce to accompany a small joint.
- A glass of portA wineglassful of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, not a modern tumbler. Ruby or tawny port both work; the tawny gives a nuttier, less sweet result.
- StewpanA shallow, straight-sided saucepan. Any small heavy pan does, though a wide one melts the jelly faster and gives you more control over the heat.
- BalanceCommercial red-currant jelly can be sweeter than a home-made one. If it tastes flat, a squeeze of lemon or a scrape of orange zest brings back the sharpness without changing the character of the sauce.
- ServingSend it to table hot in a warmed tureen or jug. It thickens as it cools and will set again in the refrigerator; rewarm gently rather than over direct high heat.
Sweet fruit sauces with game are older than Mrs Beeton by centuries: medieval and early modern English cookery routinely paired venison with verjuice, wine and sharp preserved fruit, and red-currant jelly is often said to have settled into the role of accompaniment at some point before the nineteenth century. The logic is that lean, strongly flavoured deer meat takes acidity and sweetness better than a rich pan gravy. Port entered the pairing through the eighteenth-century English trade with Portugal. The average cost of tenpence, printed as a matter of course in Beeton, is a reminder that these books were written for mistresses running an accounted household, where the price of a sauce mattered as much as its method.