Strawberry Sauce
1 cup sugar. 1/3 cup water. 2 cups strawberry pulp.
PROCESS: Make a syrup by boiling water with sugar three minutes (after mixture begins to boil), cool slightly and add strawberry pulp. Chill thoroughly and serve.
An uncooked fruit sauce built on a hot sugar syrup — three ingredients, and the only real variable is what you mean by "pulp."
- Strawberry pulpTwo cups of pulp means berries hulled and crushed or pressed through a sieve, not whole or sliced fruit. Figure roughly 1 1/2 lb of ripe berries; sieving removes most of the seeds and gives a smooth sauce, while a quick mash in a bowl leaves it rustic. The recipe does not say which is meant.
- Three minutes means three minutesTime the boil from the moment the syrup breaks into a full boil, not from when the pan goes on the heat. Longer concentrates the syrup toward the thread stage and the finished sauce turns sticky rather than pourable.
- Cool slightly, then add fruitThis is the hinge. Boiling syrup poured straight onto the pulp cooks the fruit and dulls the fresh flavour and colour; let the pan sit off the heat for five minutes or so first, until it stops steaming hard.
- Sweetness is not fixedA cup of sugar to two cups of pulp is a fairly sweet ratio by modern taste. Taste the sauce once combined and add lemon juice — a tablespoon or two — if it reads flat.
- No thickener, no pectinThis is a sauce, not a preserve. It will stay loose and slightly syrupy even when cold, which is correct; it is not meant to set and will not keep like jam.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 2 3/4 cups. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days, since nothing here is cooked or sealed for storage.
- ServingChill thoroughly, as written. It suits plain cake, cornstarch or rice pudding, vanilla ice cream, or a moulded blancmange.
The method — a short sugar syrup slightly cooled, then raw fruit stirred in — was a common way to get a fruit sauce that tasted of the fruit rather than of the stove, and similar formulas turn up for other soft fruit with only the fruit changed. Before refrigerated freight made a year-round supply routine, a strawberry sauce was a seasonal dish.