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Port Wine Sauce
To one cup Brown Sauce, from which onion has been omitted, add one-eighth tumbler current jelly, two tablespoons Port wine, and a few grains cayenne. 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon paprika Few grains pepper
A three-ingredient enrichment of an existing brown sauce, of the sort meant to be read alongside its parent recipe rather than on its own. Two of its measurements need translating and one line appears to be a printing stray.
- Start with the Brown SauceA roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut colour and moistened with brown stock. The direction to leave out the onion tells us the parent sauce normally carried one; here it is dropped so the fruit and wine read cleanly. A good unsalted beef or veal stock with a browned roux gives the same result.
- One-eighth tumblerA tumbler in this period is usually reckoned at about 8 fluid ounces, so an eighth is roughly 1 fluid ounce, about 2 tablespoons. The jelly is measured by volume, so two rounded tablespoons of stiff jelly is the intent.
- Currant jelly"Current" is a misprint for currant. Red currant jelly is meant, not blackcurrant preserve and not dried Zante currants; its sharpness is the point. If red currant is unavailable, a tart red jelly with no added spice comes closest.
- The portA ruby or tawny port, not a cream or white style. Two tablespoons into a cup of sauce is a seasoning quantity, so the wine should be one you would drink.
- Add the wine off the heatMethod -- the recipe says only "add", and gives no order of addition or heat. Melting the jelly into the hot sauce and stirring the port in off the boil is a modern preference rather than anything the original specifies.
- The stray seasoning listThe trailing "1 teaspoon salt, 14 teaspoon paprika, few grains pepper" does not belong to the sauce as written and looks like stray type carried over from an adjacent recipe; "14" is most likely a broken fraction for 1/4. Season the finished sauce to taste -- a cup of sauce built on salted stock will need very little.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup and a little over. The recipe names no dish; sauces of this type were commonly sent to table with game and roast meats.
Sweetened, wine-sharpened brown sauces for game are an old European habit — the pairing of red currant jelly with venison is generally traced to central and northern Europe, where tart wild fruit stood in for the acid that fatty, strong-flavoured meat needs, and it reached American tables by way of English cookery. Port was long used in cooking as readily as in the glass. The arrangement here is characteristic of a certain teaching method: one master sauce is taught in full, and its variations are given as short arithmetic performed on the original, so a cook who has learned Brown Sauce once has its offshoots in hand. The near relation is Cumberland sauce, the cold currant-and-port condiment for game and ham.