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Plum Sauce, Simple, for Sweet Puddings
Wash and stone a pound of ripe red plums, put them into a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of sugar and a quarter of a pint of water. Let them boil to a pulp, and stir them occasionally to prevent their burning. Press them through a coarse sieve, and serve them in a tureen or poured over the pudding. Time to boil the plums, about half an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A plain fruit pulp sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, and one of the easier Victorian sauces to reproduce exactly as written. Only the units and the cooking time need attention.
- The quarter-pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little under 2/3 US cup, or about 140 ml. An American quarter-pint is smaller, 4 US fl oz or about 120 ml, and will give a slightly thicker sauce; add water at the end if you want it looser rather than starting wet.
- WeightsA pound of plums is about 450 g, weighed before stoning, and a quarter-pound of sugar is 110 g or a generous half cup. That is a fairly restrained level of sugar for cooking plums, which is right for a sauce meant to cut the richness of a suet pudding.
- "Ripe red plums"Many Victorian plum varieties were smaller and sharper than modern dessert plums. Damsons or any tart red plum will give the acidity the recipe assumes; if you use large sweet supermarket plums, hold back some sugar and taste before finishing.
- Half an hour is generousModern plums with the stones out will collapse in 12 to 20 minutes over a low flame. Cook to a pulp and no longer; the extra time in the original may reflect firmer fruit and a slower stove. Stirring matters more than the clock, as the sugar catches easily once the fruit breaks down.
- SievingA coarse sieve holds back the skins and gives a sauce with some body. A food mill fitted with the medium plate does the same job in a fraction of the time; a blender will not, since it purees the skins and dulls the colour.
- Yield and servingEnough for five or six as the book says. Serve it hot, poured over the pudding or handed separately in a small jug; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
- CostSixpence in late-Victorian money, quoted so a cook could price a menu. It signals cheap seasonal fruit rather than anything about method.
Cassell's places this among the sauces for sweet puddings, the workaday counterparts to boiled, steamed and baked puddings that anchored the second course of an ordinary British dinner. Sweet sauces of the period divided broadly into custards, wine and butter sauces, and fruit sauces like this one; the fruit sauces were the thrifty option, made from whatever was glutting the market and requiring neither eggs nor spirits. Plums were exactly that kind of fruit in an English late summer, arriving in quantity and needing to be used, and the recipe's inclusion of a probable cost, a common feature of Cassell's entries, is aimed squarely at a household cook keeping to a budget. The instruction to serve it in a tureen is a reminder that sauce for a pudding was handed round at table, not plated in the kitchen.