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Cinnamon Sauce
Boil a stick of cinnamon, which has been broken into a dozen pieces, in half a pint of water for half an hour; add two glassfuls of sherry, two bay-leaves, and two table-spoonfuls of pounded sugar. Simmer gently for ten minutes, strain, and serve. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 3d. Sufficient for a pint of sauce.
A thin, spiced wine sauce of the kind Victorian kitchens poured over boiled and steamed puddings. It is simple, but two of its measurements need translating and one is internally inconsistent.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. Start with a little more than that, since half an hour of boiling will drive off a good deal.
- Two glassfuls of sherryA "wineglassful" in Victorian cookery books is conventionally 2 fl oz, so roughly ½ cup in total, but the term was loose and some writers meant a quarter-pint glass. Begin at ½ cup and taste; the sherry is what carries the flavour.
- The stated yieldTen ounces of water plus four of sherry cannot give an imperial pint, and half an hour of boiling reduces the water further, so expect appreciably less than the pint claimed. If you want a full pint, scale the quantities up accordingly.
- Breaking the cinnamonSnapping the quill into a dozen pieces exposes far more surface, which is the point of the long boil. Use true cinnamon (Ceylon) if you have it; cassia quills are harder to break and give a blunter, hotter flavour.
- Bay with sugarTwo bay leaves in a sweet sauce reads oddly now, but bay was not unusual in sweet puddings and custards. Add them only for the final ten-minute simmer as written.
- Pounded sugarOrdinary granulated or caster sugar. Pounded simply meant broken down from a loaf, a form now rarely found.
- Simmer, don't boil, after the wine goes inOnce the sherry is added, keep the pan below a boil. A hard boil strips the fortified wine of its aroma and leaves a flat, sugary liquid.
- ServingStrain through a fine sieve and send it out hot. It stays thin by design; if you want it to coat, whisk in a teaspoon of arrowroot slaked in cold water at the end rather than reducing further.
A sweet wine sauce was expected equipment in a nineteenth-century kitchen: boiled and steamed puddings dominated the British dessert course, and they needed something liquid poured over them. Spiced wine sauces of this shape descend from a much older medieval and early modern habit of sweetening and spicing wine to serve with meat and puddings alike, which is why a bay leaf sits here beside the sugar without comment. The costing is characteristic of the book's audience of small households running to a budget: threepence for the spice and sugar, with the wine excluded, its price varying enormously by quality.