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Cherry Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Pick and stone a pound of cherries, and pound the kernels to a paste. Mix a tea-spoonful of arrowroot smoothly with a little cold milk, and pour over it half a pint of boiling milk. Boil it for two or three minutes, then stir into it the cherries and the kernels, a tea-spoonful of minced lemon-rind, half a nutmeg grated, a table-spoonful of sugar, and a wine-glassful of port. Let these simmer gently until the cherries are quite cooked; press them through a coarse sieve, boil the sauce again for two or three minutes, and serve it very hot. Good melted butter may be substituted for the arrowroot, if preferred, and when fresh cherries are not in season, cherry jam may be used. The sauce ought to be as thick as custard and the colour of the cherries. It is very nice for boiled or baked egg puddings. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the wine. This quantity will suffice for a moderate-sized pudding.
The sauce itself is a simple thickened milk-and-fruit pudding sauce, but one instruction takes it out of range: the cherry kernels are pounded to a paste and eaten.
- The kernels are the problemThe seed inside a cherry stone contains amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. Crushing it and mixing it with liquid allows plant enzymes to convert it to hydrogen cyanide, which is the kind of reaction set going when the kernels are pounded to a paste and worked into the sauce.
- The quantity is not trivialA pound of cherries yields roughly fifty to sixty kernels, all of them pounded and none of them strained out before the flavour has been extracted. This is a far larger dose than the accidental swallowing of a whole, intact stone, which passes through unbroken and is harmless.
- Simmering does not make it safeGentle simmering and a couple of short boils are not a reliable way to drive off hydrogen cyanide or destroy the precursor. Commercial kernel flavourings are produced under controlled conditions with the toxin removed; a domestic mortar offers no such control.
- Sieving does not remove itThe recipe presses the mixture through a coarse sieve, which catches skins and pulp but not what has already dissolved into the milk and port. The kernel flavour the cook is after and the toxin travel together.
- The rest of the method is unremarkableArrowroot slaked in cold milk and let down with boiling milk, lemon rind, nutmeg, sugar and port is a standard Victorian pudding sauce. Nothing else here is objectionable, which is why the kernel instruction is easy to read past.
- If you want cherry sauceUse a current recipe that stones the fruit and discards the stones. We are not offering an adjusted version of this one.
The pounded kernel is the whole point of the original: before vanilla was cheap and universal, the bitter-almond note in cherry, peach and apricot stones was one common way among several to give a sweet sauce depth, and it appears across nineteenth-century English cookery as ratafia, noyau and the almond-scented flavouring of countless creams and puddings. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and reissued for decades, is thoroughly of that school, and the entry's costing — eightpence, wine excluded — shows how carefully such books priced a dish for a cook working to a weekly allowance. The hazard of crushed stone fruit kernels was not unknown at the time; prussic acid poisonings were reported through the century, and bitter-almond flavouring was periodically the subject of alarm. What domestic cookery books failed to convey was any sense of dose, so a kernel paste made from a whole pound of fruit could sit in a family dictionary of cookery without comment.