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Jelly Sauce
1 glass currant or grape jelly 1 level teaspoon dry mustard 1 teaspoon salt Turn the currant or grape jelly out into a deep plate and beat it to a foam. Then add dry mustard and salt and beat again thoroughly.
An uncooked sauce that depends entirely on beating air into stiff jelly, so the texture of the jelly you start with decides whether it works.
- "1 glass" of jellyA jelly glass of the period typically held about 8 ounces (smaller sizes were also common), so roughly 1 cup of jelly. Homemade jelly was put up in such tumblers, which is likely why the recipe counts vessels rather than cups.
- Use a firm-set jellyThe recipe only works if the jelly holds a shape and breaks with a clean edge. Soft or runny supermarket jellies and anything labelled preserve or spread will thin to syrup instead of foaming.
- Beating it to a foamWork it with a fork or a stiff whisk against the plate until it turns opaque and pale, a minute or two. A stand mixer will do it faster, but overworking the gel can slacken the sauce.
- The saltA full teaspoon of salt to a cup of jelly is assertive by current taste. Start with half and add to taste.
- The mustardDry mustard needs a few minutes' contact with moisture to develop its heat. Let the finished sauce stand 10 minutes before judging the seasoning.
- Yield and servingMakes about a cup, enough for six to eight servings. Serve cold or at room temperature with lamb, ham, venison, roast duck or cold game; do not warm it, or the foam collapses.
- Holding itBest beaten shortly before serving. Refrigerated, it firms up and loses much of its lightness, though a brief re-beating brings some of it back.
Currant jelly has been the standard English and American accompaniment to mutton, lamb and game for well over two centuries, and the sharp-sweet fruit-and-mustard pairing here sits in the same family as Cumberland sauce, generally traced to nineteenth-century English cookery. What marks this version as a product of its own moment is the labour-saving conceit: rather than cooking a sauce, the cook simply aerates a jar of jelly already on the shelf. New Delineator Recipes came out of The Delineator, a widely circulated women's magazine, at a time when commercially canned and jarred goods were replacing the home-put-up jelly glass, and quick uncooked sauces built from pantry staples were exactly what such collections were selling.