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Port Wine Sauce
(1). Pour one gill of port wine into an earthenware jar, adding half a wineglassful of melted red currant jelly, a saltspoonful of salt, and a teaspoonful of lemon juice, together with a small quantity of cayenne, and a teacupful of thick brown stock, or the same quantity of the drippings from meat, skimmed of all fat; then place the jar in a saucepan of water over the fire, and boil; when done, place it in a sauceboat, and serve. (2). Prepare half a pint of melted butter sauce, and incorporate with it a wineglassful of port wine, sweeten to the taste with powdered sugar, and boil gently for a quarter of an hour, stirring it occasionally.
Two sauces under one heading: the first savoury, for venison and game, the second sweetened, closer to a dessert or pudding sauce. Neither is difficult, but both depend on old measures and on one English preparation that no longer means what it says.
- The measuresA gill is 1/2 cup (4 fl oz); a wineglassful is about 2 fl oz; a saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon. A teacupful is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, smaller than a modern measuring cup, though the book itself gives no table of equivalents.
- "Melted butter sauce" is not melted butterIn version 2 this means the English butter sauce: a pale roux of butter and flour cooked without colouring, let down with water or light stock and finished with more butter, in roughly equal spoonfuls of butter and flour to a cup of liquid in period versions. Plain melted butter will not hold the wine and is liable to separate.
- The jar in the water bathThe earthenware jar set in a saucepan of boiling water is a bain-marie. It exists to keep the jelly and stock from catching and the wine from reducing too hard. A heavy small saucepan over low heat does the same job if you attend to it; a stainless bowl over simmering water is closer to the original intent.
- "Boil" means heat throughVersion 1 needs little more than time enough in the water bath for the jelly to dissolve and the flavours to come together; a hard reduction is likely to leave the port tasting bitter and dull the currant.
- The fifteen minutes in version 2A quarter-hour of gentle boiling is there to cook the raw edge off the wine and thicken the sauce. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir often; a flour-thickened sauce at a true boil will scorch on the bottom and taste of it.
- Choose the portA ruby port suits both versions. Tawny brings nutty oxidised notes that fight the currant, and a cream or white port is too sweet for version 1 once the jelly is in.
- Stock or pan drippings"Thick brown stock" means a reduced, gelatinous veal or beef stock that bodies the sauce on its own. If you use drippings, skim thoroughly as instructed and taste before adding the salt, since roasting juices are often already seasoned.
- Yield and servingVersion 1 comes to something over a cup of finished sauce, to serve alongside venison, roast mutton or duck. Version 2, half a pint of butter sauce plus a wineglassful of wine, makes a little over half a pint and belongs with steamed or boiled puddings rather than meat.
Port and red currant jelly is the classic English accompaniment to venison and other dark game, and the pairing was already well established in professional kitchens by the time Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896 — Cumberland sauce works on the same principle of fortified wine, currant and a sharp acid against rich, lean meat. What dates the entry is not the flavour but the equipment and the vocabulary: the earthenware jar standing in a pan of water is the working method of a hotel kitchen with a coal range and no thermostat, where indirect heat was the only reliable way to hold a delicate sauce. "Melted butter sauce" as a named preparation, meaning a thickened white sauce, is likewise an older English usage that has since dropped out of the language, and the second version pairs port and sugar with that same butter sauce.