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Black Currant Jelly Sauce
Into a saucepan put two tablespoonfuls of flour with one nicely chopped onion and two ounces of butter; stir over the fire until browned, then pour in half a pint of clear gravy; add a bay leaf, a little lemon peel, two tablespoonfuls of crushed juniper berries, one wineglassful of red wine, and one tablespoonful each of vinegar and chili vinegar. Season with salt and pepper to taste, stir it over the fire and boil for eight or ten minutes. Strain through a fine sieve before serving.
A brown game sauce built on a roux, aromatics and juniper. Note first that the title promises black currant jelly and the text never mentions it — Oscar's sauce is finished with a spoonful or two of the jelly stirred in off the heat, which is what makes the name make sense.
- The missing jellyThe title calls for black currant jelly but the method never mentions it. If the omission is an error, whisking 2 to 3 tablespoons of the jelly into the strained sauce while it is still hot would give the sweet-sharp balance the name implies; as written, the sauce is a peppery juniper gravy.
- Half a pintAn American half-pint is 1 cup (8 fl oz). That is a small quantity of liquid for 2 tablespoons of flour plus the wine and vinegars, so expect a sauce that coats a spoon heavily; thin with more stock if it tightens past that.
- WineglassfulIn kitchen writing of this period a wineglass is roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Use a dry red, not a sweet one, since the jelly supplies the sugar.
- Clear gravyThis means a clear brown stock or the strained pan juices of a roast, not thickened American-style gravy. A good unsalted beef or veal stock, reduced a little, is the right substitute; season at the end because the reduction concentrates salt.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian pantry staple: vinegar steeped with dried hot chillies. Use cider or white wine vinegar with a pinch of hot pepper flakes, or a dash of a vinegar-based hot sauce, and treat it as seasoning rather than a fixed measure.
- Juniper berriesTwo tablespoons crushed is assertive — resinous and gin-like. Crush them coarsely so the sieve catches the fragments, and start with one tablespoon if you have not cooked with juniper before.
- Browning the rouxOnion, butter and flour together will brown unevenly unless the heat is moderate and the pan is stirred constantly. Take it to the colour of a hazelnut shell; scorched flour cannot be strained out and will make the whole sauce bitter.
- StrainingPush the solids firmly against the sieve to extract the onion, then discard the bay, peel and juniper. The eight to ten minutes of boiling is enough to cook out the raw flour taste and reduce the vinegars.
- Yield and serviceAbout 1 cup, enough for four to six servings. It belongs with venison, hare, mutton, duck or game birds.
Sweetened, spiced brown sauces for game were standard equipment in nineteenth-century European kitchens, and this one sits squarely in that tradition: a brown roux slackened with stock, sharpened with wine and vinegar, perfumed with juniper, and softened at the last with fruit jelly. Juniper and currant are the classic partners to venison and hare in German and Austrian cooking, where the berries stand in for the flavour of the wild itself, and the book compiled by Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf-Astoria's maître d'hôtel, drew on a broadly French-German repertoire of that kind. The recipe also suggests how such books were compiled — written down without the finishing step that gave the sauce its name — a mismatch between title and method of the sort one might expect in cookbooks assembled from many hands and many notebooks. Chili vinegar, called for here as casually as salt, was then bought or steeped at home and has since largely disappeared from the American pantry in favour of bottled hot sauce.