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Red Currant Jelly Sauce
Put into a saucepan half a teacupful of red currant jelly, with half a teacupful of sherry wine, a tablespoonful of caster sugar, and the strained juice of half a lemon. Stir the sauce over the fire until the jelly has dissolved, then add a few drops of cochineal, just sufficient to tinge, and a small quantity of powdered mace. The sauce is then ready for serving.
A three-minute sauce that lives or dies on restraint: it should stay glossy and pourable, not reduce to a glaze. Warm it just enough to melt the jelly.
- TeacupfulThe teacup was not a standardised measure; period sources put it anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz, and some writers used it interchangeably with a half-pint cup. Half a teacupful is best read as somewhere between 3 and 4 fl oz. Measure the jelly and the sherry in the same vessel so the proportions stay one to one.
- Caster sugarSuperfine granulated sugar, sold as caster or baker's sugar. Ordinary granulated works here because the sauce is heated, and jelly is already sweet enough that the tablespoon is more about gloss than sweetness.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. Currant jelly is a pectin gel; held at a simmer it breaks down, the sherry cooks off, and you are left with a sticky syrup. Stir over low heat only until the jelly has liquefied, roughly two to three minutes.
- CochinealLiquid carmine, extracted from the dried insect Dactylopius coccus, sold at the time as a red food tint. It is still a legal colouring (carmine, E120), but it is not vegetarian and is a documented allergen for a small number of people. The sauce needs no colour beyond what the jelly gives it, and can simply be left out.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. Pre-ground mace fades quickly; a generous pinch from a fresh jar, or a light grating of nutmeg, gets you where Oscar was going. "A small quantity" is best read as a pinch, to taste.
- SherryA medium or dry amontillado suits game better than a sweet cream sherry, which will push the sauce toward dessert. Because it is barely cooked, the alcohol remains largely in the finished sauce.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings. It is a hot sauce for venison, saddle of hare, roast mutton and game birds; strain it if the jelly leaves any seeds or skins, and send it to the table in a warmed boat.
Red currant jelly with game is one of the oldest fixed pairings in European cookery, and by the nineteenth century a pot of it was standard equipment in any kitchen that roasted venison; Cumberland sauce, its better-known cousin, is the same idea with port and orange. Turning the jelly into a hot sauce with wine, lemon and mace belongs to the Anglo-French hotel repertoire that Oscar Tschirky ran at the Waldorf, where a French sauce vocabulary was applied to the game that came through the New York markets in autumn. The drops of cochineal are the period's tell: hotel dining rooms of the 1890s expected colour to be corrected as a matter of course, and commercial carmine is often said to have been kept close at hand on the pastry and sauce stations. Federal food-colour regulation in the United States did not arrive until the Food and Drugs Act of 1906, a decade after this book was published.