Cherry Sauce
2 cups pitted cherries. 1 cup claret. 2/3 cup sugar. 1½ glass red currant jelly.
Juice 1 lemon. ½ dozen Cassia buds.
PROCESS: Mix the ingredients in the order given, cook slowly until reduced to a syrup. Strain through a sieve and serve hot with Cherry Roly-Poly or Dumplings.
A dessert sauce built on the old pattern of fruit, wine and jelly cooked down to a syrup. Two of its measures need translating before you start.
- "1½ glass" of jellyCurrant jelly was sold and set in glasses or tumblers, but the unit is genuinely imprecise: a "glass" in period recipes can mean anything from a small wineglass to an 8-ounce tumbler, so a glass and a half might be a few ounces or well over a cup. Start at 3/4 cup and taste, since the jelly is doing the thickening as well as the sweetening.
- Cassia budsThe small dried immature fruits (often described as unopened flower buds) of the cassia tree, with a cinnamon-like flavour of its own character, and long a component of American pickling spice. They are still sold by spice merchants; a dozen and a half is roughly a teaspoon. One cinnamon stick, removed before straining, gets you near the same place.
- ClaretNineteenth-century American usage for dry red Bordeaux, or anything sold as its imitation. Any dry, unoaked red will do. Most of the alcohol cooks off during the reduction but not all of it.
- The cherriesSour cherries suit this sauce, holding their acidity against a cup of wine and two-thirds of a cup of sugar. Sweet cherries will make a flabby sauce; cut the sugar to about half and add a little more lemon if that is what you have.
- "Cook slowly until reduced to a syrup"This is the hinge. A gentle uncovered simmer of 20 to 30 minutes will take the liquid to a coating consistency; a hard boil scorches the sugar and jelly against the pan before the fruit has given up its juice. Stir occasionally and judge by how the syrup runs off a spoon, not by the clock.
- StrainingPushing the cooked fruit through a sieve gives you a smooth, glossy sauce and removes the cassia buds. If you want the fruit in the sauce, lift out the buds and skip the sieve, but then reduce a little further since the whole cherries will thin it as they sit.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of finished syrup, enough for six servings over a roly-poly or dumplings. It keeps a week refrigerated and reheats gently; it will set firmer when cold because of the jelly.
Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in 1913 by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which made Cottolene, a compound shortening of cottonseed oil and beef suet; like a good deal of American cookbook writing of the period, it was a manufacturer's promotional volume that also happened to be a competent menu book, arranged week by week through the year. A wine-and-currant-jelly sauce of this kind belongs to a long line of Anglo-American dessert and game sauces in which red currant jelly supplies both body and tartness, a habit inherited from British cookery. The cassia buds are the period detail: they are generally said to have reached American kitchens through the spice trade with China, and they were common in pickle and preserve recipes well into the twentieth century before falling almost entirely out of domestic use in favor of ground cinnamon.