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Currant Jelly Sauce
1/2 glass currant jelly 1 cup hot brown sauce Melt jelly over slow fire. "Add brown sauce; stir well and simmer one minute.
A two-ingredient finishing sauce for game and roast meats. Everything depends on the brown sauce you start with and on not letting the jelly scorch.
- "Half a glass" of jellyJelly tumblers of the period ran roughly 6 to 8 ounces, so half a glass is somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup of currant jelly. A tart red currant jelly is the usual choice rather than a sweet jam.
- Brown sauceThis means a proper espagnole or a reduced brown gravy built on browned flour and meat stock, not a bottled steak sauce. A cup of good demi-glace or a well-reduced pan gravy from the roast will do the same work.
- "Slow fire"Low heat, and the hinge of the whole thing. Currant jelly is largely sugar, and over direct high heat it will catch and turn bitter before it has finished melting. Melt it gently, stirring, until it is a clear syrup with no lumps.
- Simmer one minute, no moreThe brief simmer is only to marry the two and drive off the raw edge of the jelly. Longer reduction concentrates the sugar and the sauce turns sticky and candy-like on the plate.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups. The recipe gives no serving suggestion; sauces of this kind were commonly served with game and roast meats, spooned over sliced meat or passed hot.
- Adjusting itIf the sauce reads too sweet against the meat, a spoonful of vinegar, port or the roasting-pan deglazing liquid will pull it back into balance. Strain it if the brown sauce has left any flour lumps.
Red currant jelly with roast meat is a long-standing British habit, generally traced to the older practice of serving sharp fruit sauces and verjuice with venison and mutton to cut their richness; the same instinct produced Cumberland sauce, which adds port, orange and mustard to much the same base. The cup of brown sauce reflects how thoroughly the French mother-sauce vocabulary had filtered into domestic cookbooks, which could assume a reader who either had a brown sauce on hand or knew how to build one from a roux and stock. Recipes this short assume a reader who could fill in the technique and needed only the proportion.