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Currant Jelly Sauce
To one cup Brown Sauce, from which onion has been omitted, add one-fourth tumbler current jelly and one tablespoon Sherry wine; or, add currant jelly to one cup gravy made to serve with roast lamb. Currant Jelly Sauce is suitable to serve with lamb.
A two-line finishing sauce that assumes you already have the book's Brown Sauce or a pan gravy on hand. The work is in the base; the jelly and sherry take a minute.
- "One-fourth tumbler"A tumbler in this period is usually reckoned as an ordinary drinking glass of about 8 fl oz, so a quarter is roughly 2 fl oz, or about 4 tablespoons. The measure is genuinely loose — start with a couple of tablespoons of jelly to a cup of sauce and add more to taste, since jellies vary a great deal in sweetness.
- "Current" jellyA printer's slip for currant. Red currant jelly is meant, not black; black currant is far more assertive and will dominate the lamb.
- The Brown Sauce baseFarmer's Brown Sauce is butter and flour cooked to a nut brown, then brown stock — an espagnole in miniature. Omitting the onion, as directed, keeps the flavour clean so the fruit reads clearly. A good reduced veal or lamb stock thickened lightly will do the same job.
- Melt, do not boilWhisk the jelly into the hot sauce off direct heat until it dissolves, then add the Sherry and warm through. Hard boiling after the jelly goes in dulls the fruit and blows off much of the wine's aroma.
- Choose the SherrySherry sold for household use in this period was often on the medium-dry to sweet side, though styles varied. A dry fino tastes thin here; an amontillado or oloroso suits the sauce better. Cooking sherry with added salt is best avoided.
- The gravy variantThe second method — jelly stirred into roast lamb gravy — is the quicker one and arguably better, since the pan drippings already carry the meat. Skim the fat well first or the jelly will sit on top in sweet streaks.
- Yield and servingA little over a cup, enough for perhaps four to six servings. Serve it warm rather than hot in a small boat alongside; it is a condiment, not a sauce to nap the plate.
Sweet fruit with roast meat is much older than this book — medieval and early modern English cookery leaned hard on verjuice, barberries and fruit conserves alongside mutton and venison — and by the nineteenth century red currant jelly had settled into the role of the standard accompaniment to lamb, mutton and game in Anglo-American kitchens. Fannie Farmer's contribution here is the framework rather than the idea: her Boston Cooking-School Cook Book organises sauces as a system of variations on a few mother sauces, so Currant Jelly Sauce is presented not as a dish in its own right but as one cup of Brown Sauce plus two additions. That approach was borrowed loosely from French professional practice and adapted for the domestic cook. The alternative given — stir jelly into the pan gravy — is the plainer household version of the same thing.