Game Sauce

History

This "Game Sauce" is Abby Fisher's own recipe, printed in her 1881 book "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco). It is a slow-cooked sweet-and-tart preserve of plums and silver-skin onions, the onions first stewed in vinegar, then simmered with the plums, sugar, cayenne, black pepper, cinnamon and salt over a slow fire for a full day and sealed in a jar — a condiment meant to accompany game. Fisher's own printed instruction ends: "when cool cork in a tight jar and keep in cool closet — you will find it the best sauce in the world."

Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton; she was raised on a plantation and never had access to schooling. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. By the late 1870s she and her family had reached San Francisco, where she worked as a cook and caterer and won recognition for her preserving: a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880, for best pickles and sauces and best assortment of jellies and preserves. Unable to read or write herself — "Not being able to read or write myself," she says in her preface — she dictated the book to friends and associates, who set down the recipes she had mastered. Her book is the second known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866), and stands among the earliest cookbooks by an African American author.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular sauce. It survives as Fisher set it down: a dish of the Southern preserving and cooking she carried in her own hands and published under her own name.

Ingredients

• 1 peck plums
• 6 whole silver skin onions
• 1 pint vinegar
• 4 pounds granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoonful cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoonful black pepper
• 2 ounces cinnamon
• 1 teaspoonful table salt

Instructions

1. Seed the plums.
2. Chop the silver skin onions very fine.
3. Put the onions to stew in a pint of vinegar in a porcelain kettle until thoroughly done.
4. Add the stewed onions to the plums and put on to cook.
5. Add four pounds of granulated sugar, one teaspoonful of cayenne pepper, one teaspoonful of black pepper, two ounces of cinnamon broken in fine pieces, and one teaspoonful of table salt.
6. Cook on a slow fire, stirring frequently to avoid burning.
7. Continue cooking for one whole day until complete.
8. When cool, cork in a tight jar and keep in a cool closet.