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Red Currant Sauce
Take a handful of red currants and boil in water for a few minutes; add one ounce of butter, four cloves, three tablespoonfuls of sifted breadcrumbs and one wineglassful of port wine; stir until it boils, and serve very hot. One ounce of grocer's currants are sometimes used instead of red currants in making this sauce.
A thickened game sauce of the old English type, closer to bread sauce than to a jelly glaze. It is short on quantities, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- A handful of currantsFresh red currants weigh little; a generous handful is about 4 oz, or roughly a cup on the stem. Strip them before cooking.
- How much waterUnstated. Use just enough to cover the fruit, about 1/2 cup, so the finished sauce is thick rather than soupy. The breadcrumbs will absorb most of it.
- A wineglassfulIn American books of this period a wineglass is 2 fl oz, or 1/4 cup. Use a tawny or ruby port, not a cooking wine.
- Grocer's currants are not currantsThe substitute named at the end is dried Zante currants, a small raisin, and quite unrelated botanically to the red currant bush. An ounce of them gives a sweeter, darker, jammier sauce; soak them in the hot water a few minutes before proceeding.
- The clovesFour whole cloves in a sauce this small is assertive. Fish them out before serving, or bruise them and strain the sauce, unless you want a guest biting into one.
- Sifted breadcrumbsDry, fine crumbs from stale white bread, sieved, not the coarse packaged sort and certainly not panko. Add them off the heat, then bring the sauce back to a boil briefly and stir hard; crumbs dumped into a rolling sauce clump.
- Don't cook it downOnce the crumbs are in, the sauce thickens fast and scorches faster. A minute at the boil is enough, and it must go to the table hot, as it stiffens as it cools.
- Yield and useRoughly 3/4 cup once boiled down, though the recipe gives no yield or serving number. Sauces of this kind were traditionally served with roast venison, hare, mutton or game birds, but the recipe itself does not say.
Sauces of this shape -- fruit, port, spice and breadcrumbs -- descend from the medieval English habit of thickening with bread rather than flour or butter, the same logic that produced bread sauce for poultry and the currant-and-port sauces still served with venison. Red currants were a standard kitchen-garden fruit in Britain and the northeastern United States, valued for the pectin and sharpness that cut rich, dark meat, and Cumberland sauce is the best-known survivor of the family. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, reads as a working reference for a hotel kitchen that had to send out game in season, and the closing note about substituting dried grocer's currants is a practical concession: fresh red currants have a short summer season, while the dried fruit sat in every storeroom year round.