No. 601

Currant Sauce with Orange

Sauce aux Groseilles a l'Orange

This is prepared with currant jelly diluted with port wine; add to it the rind of one orange grated on sugar and pressed through a sieve. Peel another orange and after shredding the peel very finely cook it in water, drain and then add it to the sauce, with the juice of the two oranges.

← No. 600 Currant or Gooseberry Sauce with Sugar Cold Sauces No. 602 Fine Herbs Sauce and Shallots with Oil →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives a method rather than a formula, as he usually does for the cold sauce chapter. The proportions below are the conventional ones for this family of sauce; the technique matters more than the exact ratio.

Working quantitiesA practical batch is one 12 oz jar of red currant jelly to about 1/3 cup (roughly 2 1/2 fl oz) of port, plus the zest and juice of two oranges. Ranhofer specifies none of this, so adjust the port until the sauce pours thickly from a spoon.
"Groseille"In French the word means currant; gooseberry is groseille a maquereau, and the preceding recipe (No. 600) pairs the two. Here it is red currant jelly. Use a firm, tart, high-pectin jelly rather than a sweet jam with fruit in it.
Rind grated on sugarThe old method is to rub a sugar lump over the whole orange until the lump is saturated with coloured oil, then dissolve it and pass it through a sieve. A microplane zest worked into a tablespoon of sugar with your fingers does the same job and captures the same volatile oils.
Why the second peel is blanchedThe finely shredded julienne is cooked in water to draw out bitterness from the pith and to soften it. Two or three changes of boiling water, a minute or so each, then a cold rinse; peel added raw stays harsh and leathery.
Do not boil the jellyRanhofer gives no heating instruction at all. If you do warm the jelly to loosen it and marry it with the port, keep it gentle: hard boiling drives off the wine's aroma and the orange oil, and can soften the jelly's set so the sauce stays thin on cooling.
PortA ruby port is the right choice; tawny reads too nutty against the fruit. If the alcohol is unwelcome, note that a brief simmer will reduce it but will also cost you the perfume the sauce is built on.
Yield and serviceRoughly two cups from the quantities above, though the number it serves depends on how it is used. It is a cold sauce: chill it and serve with cold game, venison, roast ham, tongue or a cold saddle of hare.

A Little History

This resembles the sauce English cooks call Cumberland, though Ranhofer's version lacks the mustard and shallot usually found in that sauce; Cumberland is generally traced to the nineteenth-century English kitchen, and the origin of its name is uncertain. The pairing of red currant jelly with port and orange peel was a familiar accompaniment to venison and cold game. Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an exhaustive reference to what a great American restaurant kitchen actually did, and his cold sauce chapter reflects that: a run of short, closely related preparations built from a few pantry staples, each numbered so a cook could be told to make No. 601 and need no further explanation. Rubbing a loaf-sugar lump against citrus was a long-established way to capture the oil in the skin without the bitter white pith beneath.