No. 622

Raisin Sauce

Sauce aux Raisins

Pour two gills of good vinegar into a saucepan, add a bunch of parsley, garnished with two bay leaves and as much thyme, pepper corns and cloves; reduce the liquid to half; then add four gills of good gravy (No. 404). Boil the whole, dissolve a tablespoonful of fecula in two gills of cold broth, mix in with the sauce, then boil, skim and add a quarter of a pound of Smyrna raisins and the same quantity of currants, also half a pound of currant jelly (No. 3670), dissolving it slowly; let the sauce get cold and serve it up with game.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A cold, sweet-sharp fruit sauce of the Cumberland family, built on a reduced vinegar infusion and brown gravy. Nothing here is difficult, but the measures are in gills and the thickener is one most kitchens no longer stock under that name.

Gills to cupsA gill is half a cup. Two gills of vinegar is 1 cup, four gills of gravy is 2 cups, and two gills of cold broth is 1 cup. Reducing the vinegar by half leaves you about 1/2 cup of infusion.
FeculaFécule is the French term for starch, most often potato starch; arrowroot or cornstarch behaves much the same in this quantity. A tablespoon slaked in a cup of cold broth gives a light nappe, not a gravy, and the sauce will thicken further as it cools.
The gravyThe cross-reference is to Ranhofer's own gravy recipe, a brown meat gravy closer to a reduced stock than to pan gravy. A good unsalted brown stock reduced until it coats a spoon is the right substitute; avoid anything already thickened with roux.
Strain before thickeningThe recipe never tells you to remove the parsley bundle, bay, thyme, peppercorns and cloves. Lift out the bouquet and strain the reduced vinegar before the starch goes in, or you will be picking whole cloves out of a cold sauce.
Smyrna raisins and currantsSmyrna raisins are the pale seedless grapes shipped from Izmir — sold now as sultanas or golden raisins. "Currants" here means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. A quarter pound of each is roughly 3/4 cup apiece.
Currant jellyNo. 3670 is red currant jelly. Half a pound is about 3/4 cup. Melt it into the hot sauce off a hard boil and stir until fully dissolved; a rolling boil after the jelly goes in can dull the fruit flavour and darken the colour.
Vinegar strengthVinegar was not standardised in this period and its strength varied, unlike the 5-7 percent sold today. Taste the finished sauce cold rather than hot -- chilling mutes sweetness and pushes acidity forward, so a sauce balanced warm can read sour from the refrigerator.
Yield and serviceAbout 5 cups, enough for a large roast of venison, hare or wildfowl with plenty over. Serve at cool room temperature rather than fridge-cold, and keep it no more than three or four days refrigerated, since it is a meat-stock sauce despite the sugar.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer set this among the cold sauces in The Epicurean (1894), his encyclopaedic record of what he cooked in more than thirty years at Delmonico's in New York. Sweet-and-sour fruit sauces for game are very old — medieval European cookery routinely paired venison and wildfowl with vinegar, dried fruit and spice — and by the nineteenth century the type had settled into a small family of preparations built on redcurrant jelly, of which Cumberland sauce is the best-known survivor. What distinguishes Ranhofer's version is the French backbone: a vinegar reduced over a bouquet of parsley, bay, thyme, peppercorns and cloves, then bound with meat gravy and lightly set with potato starch, so the fruit sits in a sauce rather than a syrup. The dried grapes point outward to the trade routes that supplied an American luxury kitchen — Smyrna raisins from the Aegean, Zante currants from the Ionian islands — both staples of the imported-grocery shelf in the 1890s and both named, as such goods often were, for the port they shipped from.