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Currant Jelly Sauce
Prepare a breakfast cupful of brown sauce, strain it well, and add a teacupful of currant jelly made warm; put it in a pan on the fire, and stir until the jelly is quite hot and well mixed. It is then ready for use. Red Currant Jelly Sauce for Game Brown in a stewpan with three tablespoonfuls of butter a finely shaped onion; then add one tablespoonful of flour, a bay leaf and sprig of celery, and stir until these also begin to brown; add a pint of good stock and simmer on one side of the fire for twenty minutes. Pass the sauce through a strainer back into the pan, skim off the fat, add one teacupful of red currant jelly, and stir over the fire until it is melted. It is then ready for use.
Two sauces in one entry: a quick version that leans on ready-made brown sauce, and a longer game sauce built from scratch. Both live or die on the same point.
- The hinge: melt, don't boilOnce the jelly goes in, keep the pan at a bare simmer and stir only until it is smooth and glossy. The recipe asks no more than that the jelly be hot and well mixed; hard boiling only reduces the sauce further and concentrates the sweetness.
- Breakfast cup and teacupThese were not standardised measures. A breakfast cup is usually reckoned at somewhere around 8-10 fl oz, a teacup smaller, at roughly 5-6 fl oz. The ratio matters more than the absolute amounts.
- "A finely shaped onion"Probably a slip for finely chopped, or possibly sliced. Either works, since the onion is strained out before the jelly goes in.
- Brown sauceOscar assumes the kitchen's espagnole, a roux-thickened brown stock reduction kept on hand all day. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened with a brown roux, or a decent commercial demi-glace, stands in.
- "Simmer on one side of the fire"On a coal range, the cooler edge of the top. On a modern burner this is the lowest setting with the pot half off the heat, so the sauce barely trembles for the full twenty minutes and the flour cooks out.
- Sprig of celeryCelery leaves and the top of a stalk, not seed. Use the leafy inner ribs, which carry most of the aroma; it is strained out with the bay leaf and onion.
- Skim properlyStraining and skimming are not optional steps here. Butter-heavy roux sauces throw a good deal of fat, and unskimmed sauce will taste greasy against the jelly's sweetness.
- Yield and servingStarting from a pint of stock, the game sauce yields something under a pint once it has simmered down and the jelly is stirred in. The heading points it at game; currant jelly sauces were also served with venison, duck, hare and mutton.
Currant jelly with roast meat is one of the oldest surviving English sweet-sour pairings, and by the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms it had been thoroughly absorbed into the French service kitchen as the base of what escoffier-era menus call venaison sauce. The second recipe here is simply a small espagnole - butter, flour, onion, bay, stock, twenty minutes, strained - finished with jelly: one mother sauce, then a flavouring at the end. Red currants themselves were a staple of American and British kitchen gardens well into the twentieth century, so a jar of homemade jelly was an assumed pantry item rather than a purchase, which is why neither recipe bothers to say how sweet it should be. Currant cultivation was later restricted in parts of the United States because the plants host white pine blister rust, and the fruit's near-disappearance from American markets is a large part of why this sauce now reads as archaic.