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Fruit Sweet Sauces
Stone some plums or cherries, having first washed them in cold water. Break the stones, blanch the kernels, and boil them gently in a very little water. Stew the fruit until quite tender with about a glassful of red wine, and a little cinnamon, powdered. When it is tender, add a piece of bread, toasted, and the water from the kernels, and stew until all can be pulped through a sieve. Sugar may be mixed according to taste, and the sauce may be thinned with wine or water.
This is a medieval-style fruit sauce thickened with toasted bread, and it turns on a step no modern kitchen should follow: the deliberate extraction of flavour from cracked plum and cherry stones.
- The kernels are the problemPlum and cherry kernels, like bitter almonds and apricot kernels, contain amygdalin. When the kernel is crushed and wetted, its own enzymes convert that amygdalin into hydrogen cyanide. Blanching and a gentle simmer do not reliably destroy it.
- The cooking water is keptThe recipe does not discard the kernel water; it directs that it be added back to the fruit. That water is precisely where the released cyanide ends up, so the one step that might have limited exposure is reversed.
- No quantity is given"Some plums or cherries" leaves the number of kernels entirely open. Toxic dose depends on how many kernels, how finely broken and how concentrated the liquor is, and none of those are controlled here. There is no way to make the recipe as printed within a known margin.
- Not the same as commercial noyauModern kernel flavourings and ratafia essences are generally made with benzaldehyde or from material processed and tested for cyanogenic content, and marzipan is made from sweet almonds with any bitter note supplied by such a flavouring. A domestic infusion of cracked stones is not equivalent, however traditional it is.
- What to use insteadFor a spiced plum or cherry sauce, follow a current recipe. Almond extract supplies the same bitter-kernel note the original was chasing.
- On the rest of the methodFor context only: 'a glassful' here is presumably a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz in Victorian practice, and the piece of toasted bread is a thickener of a kind older than roux or cornflour, pulped through the sieve with the fruit.
Sauces of stewed fruit thickened with toasted bread belong to a much older European tradition than the flour-thickened sauces that dominate the rest of Cassell's, and they survived into the late nineteenth century. The habit of cracking the stones for their kernels is older still: cooks valued the bitter-almond note the kernels give, and the same instinct produced ratafia, noyau and the almond flavouring of countless puddings. That the kernels of stone fruit are poisonous in quantity was suspected long before it was understood, and this entry calls for them freely. The chemistry of amygdalin was worked out in the nineteenth century, but the knowledge took decades to filter into domestic manuals, which is why a recipe like this could still be printed as unremarkable household advice.