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Plum Sauce, for Puddings and Sweet Dishes
Wash and stone the plums. Break the stones, and simmer the kernels in as much water as will barely cover them until the liquid is strongly flavoured with them, them, then strain it, and put it aside until wanted. Place the fruit in a saucepan with as much water only as will keep it from burning. Add a glass of claret, a pinch of powdered cinnamon, and a slice of toasted bread, and simmer all gently together until the plums are quite soft. Press the whole through a coarse sieve, add the liquid from the kernels and as much sugar as will sweeten the sauce. If it is too thick, stir in a little more water before serving. Time, according to the quality of the plums. Sufficient, half a pint of sauce for five or six persons.
The body of this sauce is unremarkable, but its defining step — an infusion made from cracked plum stones — is the reason it should not be reproduced.
- The kernels are the problemPlum stones enclose a kernel containing amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. Simmering the broken kernels in water, then straining and adding that water to the finished sauce, is a deliberate extraction of exactly that material.
- No quantity is given anywhereThe recipe never states how many plums, how many kernels, or how much water — only that the liquid should be "strongly flavoured". Strength of flavour tracks strength of the extract, so the instruction sets no upper limit on dose. There is no way to bring this within a measurable range as written.
- Boiling does not make it safeSome hydrogen cyanide is volatile and drives off, but the glycoside itself is water-soluble and stays in the strained liquid, where gut bacteria can hydrolyse it and release cyanide after eating. Commercial noyau and kernel flavourings are made under controls on cyanide content for this reason; a domestic pan is not equivalent.
- Children and small servingsThis is a pudding sauce, portioned at half a pint across five or six people, and puddings are eaten by children. Tolerance for cyanogenic compounds scales with body weight, which makes an unmeasured kernel infusion a poor thing to spoon over a nursery dish.
- The rest of the method, for readingThe slice of toasted bread acts as a thickener in the older manner, pressed through the sieve with the fruit to give body without cornflour. A "glass" of claret in period recipes is normally taken as a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, and "half a pint" is the imperial 10 fl oz. Sugar is left to taste, presumably because plum acidity varies widely by variety and ripeness.
- If you want the dishA plain plum sauce — fruit, a little water, red wine, cinnamon, sugar, sieved — is a sound modern preparation, but use a current recipe rather than this one and leave the stones out entirely.
Kernel flavouring was common in nineteenth-century English confectionery: the stone of a plum, peach, apricot or cherry gives a bitter-almond note, and cookbooks of the period called for it freely, whether as cracked kernels, ratafia, or the liqueur noyau. Cassell's aims at ordinary middle-class practice, and this sauce shows the household economy behind that habit -- nothing is discarded, the stones are made to earn their keep, and even the bread becomes the thickening. The claret and cinnamon place it with the English fruit sauces for boiled and baked puddings, closer in spirit to an older sweet-spiced sauce than to the custards and cornflour sauces that later displaced them. The toxicity of kernels was not unknown at the time -- bitter almond essence and prussic acid were treated with respect in pharmacy -- but the risk was understood as a matter of gross dose rather than of everyday measurement, which is precisely the gap between that kitchen and this one.