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Currant Jelly Sauce
I onion
1 stalk celery
1 tablespoon butter
I bay-leaf
1 tablespoon flour
2 tablespoons vinegar
½ cup currant jelly
2 cups stock
Slice the onion and cook in the butter till it begins to color, then add the flour and herbs and stir until brown. Add the vinegar and the stock and simmer twenty minutes. Strain, skim off all the fat, put in the jelly and stir it until it is melted. This sauce is used with game.
A brown sauce built on a browned onion roux, sharpened with vinegar and sweetened with currant jelly — the standard nineteenth-century accompaniment to venison, hare and wildfowl. Nothing here is obsolete, but a few details in the wording need reading twice.
- The typographyThe "I" at the start of several lines stands for the numeral 1: 1 onion, 1 bay-leaf. The ingredient list has been run together in transcription, which is why it reads as a jumble.
- "The herbs"The method calls for herbs but the list gives only a bay-leaf and celery. Add both at that point. If you want the fuller period flavour, a sprig of thyme and a few parsley stalks are in keeping.
- Brown the roux properlyThis is the hinge. The flour must be stirred in the butter until it is genuinely nut-brown, several minutes over moderate heat, or the sauce tastes pasty and stays pale. Keep it moving; scorched flour turns the whole thing bitter and cannot be rescued.
- StockTwo cups of brown veal or beef stock, or game trimmings simmered down. Commercial low-sodium beef broth works, but reduce the vinegar slightly if it is already assertive.
- Jelly off the heatAdd the jelly once the sauce is strained and off the boil; gentle stirring melts the half-cup in under a minute. There is no advantage in boiling it hard after the jelly goes in.
- VinegarTwo tablespoons of a plain wine or cider vinegar. The point is to keep the jelly from reading as dessert, so taste at the end and adjust — the balance depends entirely on how sweet the jelly is.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half after reduction and straining. The recipe states no yield; that quantity will serve several as a spooned sauce.
Currant jelly with game is a long-standing English sweet-and-sour pairing, often traced to the older habit of cutting rich, strong-flavoured meat with fruit and vinegar; by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries red-currant jelly was a common accompaniment to venison and hare, and the sauce here is simply that jelly folded into a brown sauce so it can be poured. Red currants were a familiar garden fruit and made a stiff, tart jelly with no added pectin, which is what the recipe assumes; the softer, sweeter commercial jellies on shelves today are why tasting for acid at the end matters more now.