Sultana Sauce
Pick over raisins, cover them with water and cook until raisins are tender. Mix sugar, cornstarch and salt, add slowly to raisins and water, stirring constantly. Cook slowly twenty minutes; add butter, lemon juice and wine. Reheat and serve.
The method survives intact but the ingredient list did not travel with it; this page gives proportions only by implication. Treat it as a formula rather than a recipe.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given for raisins, sugar, cornstarch, butter, lemon juice or wine. Sauces of this type are often made with roughly equal volumes of raisins and water, with sugar and cornstarch in small amounts, but any figure here would be a guess rather than a conversion.
- SultanasSultanas are the small seedless golden raisins from the Thompson-type grape. Modern golden raisins are the direct equivalent; dark seedless raisins work but give a muddier colour and a heavier flavour.
- Pick overA century ago dried fruit arrived with stems, grit and the occasional stone, so picking over was a real step. Packaged raisins today need only a rinse, though it is worth checking for stray stems.
- Cornstarch needs the cold-liquid trickMixing the cornstarch with the sugar and salt before it meets the hot raisin liquid is the whole point of that instruction: the sugar keeps the grains apart so they hydrate without lumping. Stir it in off the boil, then return to the heat.
- Twenty minutes is not too longCornstarch thickens within a minute or two of boiling, but a slow twenty-minute cook here is about plumping the raisins and reducing the syrup rather than setting the starch. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir often, since a sugary starch sauce scorches easily.
- Butter and wine go in last for a reasonButter and wine go in last -- The recipe adds them after the twenty-minute cook and asks only for a reheat, not further boiling. Hard boiling drives off what the wine was added for, and butter stirred in at the end gives the gloss.
- The wineSherry, madeira or port all suit this sauce; a dry white will read thin against the sugar. Grape or apple juice with a squeeze more lemon substitutes acceptably if the sauce is going to children.
- What it goes withThis is a savoury-sweet sauce for baked ham, boiled tongue or roast pork, spooned over at the table.
Raisin sauce for ham belongs to a long European tradition of sweet-sour fruit sauces cut with wine and vinegar or lemon, served with salted and smoked meats to offset the cure; the medieval and Renaissance versions were thickened with bread or ground almonds rather than starch. Cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from about the mid-nineteenth century, gradually displaced those older thickeners and is what makes this version look modern. The name points to the fruit: sultanas, the pale seedless raisins whose name is traditionally linked to the Ottoman sultanate, reached Western kitchens by way of Smyrna and later other Mediterranean sources, and were prized for their sweetness and their light colour, which keeps the finished sauce clear rather than brown. Its appearance in a book organised as fifty-two complete Sunday dinners is characteristic of the period's household economy, where a single roast anchored the meal and a sauce made from pantry staples did the work of making it feel considered.