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Sauce, Porto
Place two tablespoons currant jelly in a small saucepan with half a gill port wine, thoroughly mix, add one gill of demi-glace, the rind of half a lemon, and boil for five minutes. Remove the lemon rind and use as required.
A classic port-and-currant sauce for game, duck and venison, built on the assumption that a good demi-glace is already sitting in the cold room. The whole dish stands or falls on that base.
- Gills, translatedA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). Half a gill of port is therefore 4 tablespoons (2 fl oz); a gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup. Before reduction that is about 7 fl oz of liquid, so the finished yield is somewhere around 3/4 cup.
- The demi-glace is the recipeEverything else here is seasoning. Demi-glace is brown veal stock and espagnole reduced by half until it coats a spoon and sets to a jelly when cold. A thin, unreduced stock will give you sweet purple liquid rather than sauce; if you are not making your own, buy a concentrated demi-glace rather than substituting canned gravy.
- Lemon rind, not zestPare the rind in wide strips with a peeler, avoiding the white pith, so it can be lifted out whole after five minutes. Grated zest cannot be removed and will turn the sauce bitter and cloudy.
- Port to useThe recipe specifies only 'port wine'. A ruby port — young, fruity and sweet — suits the currant best; tawny brings nutty oxidised notes that fight it, and vintage port is wasted here.
- Five minutes is a reduction, not a warm-throughBoil hard enough to see the volume drop and the sauce gloss over. If it still tastes of raw alcohol, keep going another minute or two.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not blackcurrant preserve and not jam with fruit in it. If yours is very sweet, hold back a spoonful and taste before adding the rest.
- FinishingThe recipe simply says to remove the rind and use the sauce as required; straining through a fine sieve and swirling in a tablespoon of cold butter off the heat are modern embellishments, not part of the text. Serve hot with game or roast duck.
Port and red currant is the standing accompaniment to game in nineteenth and early twentieth century professional cookery, appearing under various names — Porto among them — and as the close cousin of Cumberland sauce, which uses the same jelly, port and citrus but is served cold and unthickened. What marks this version as a restaurant recipe rather than a domestic one is the casual call for a gill of demi-glace: a kitchen brigade kept it on hand at all times, reduced down from the day's stockpot, and many of the small sauces in books of this period are nothing more than demi-glace plus two or three flavourings boiled briefly together. The International Cook Book by Alexander Filippini, first published in 1906, belongs to that tradition of chef's reference works, organised so a cook could find a sauce in seconds and assemble it in five minutes from what was already simmering.