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Polish Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Put an ounce of butter and a tea-spoonful of moist sugar into a stewpan, and when the sugar is dissolved stir in a tea-spoonful of fine flour. Let it brown, then pour in four table-spoonfuls of claret, add a tea-spoonful of stoned and chopped raisins, a tea-spoonful of picked and washed currants, the eighth of a small nutmeg, grated, an inch of thin lemon-rind, and half a dozen almonds blanched and cut small. Simmer the sauce gently, until the currants are soft, and serve. Time to simmer, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 3d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A small wine-and-fruit sauce built on a browned roux, meant to be spooned over a steamed or boiled sweet pudding. The quantities are tiny and the whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- The hinge: brown the flour, not the butterThe flour must be cooked in the butter and sugar until it takes colour, which is what gives this sauce its nutty depth and keeps it from tasting of raw paste. Work over moderate heat and stir constantly; sugar in the pan means it will catch and turn bitter faster than a plain roux.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar. Light or dark brown sugar is the direct equivalent; granulated white will work but loses the molasses note the sauce is built around.
- ClaretClaret is the English term for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red will do. Four tablespoons is a quarter cup, and with a quarter-hour of simmering the sauce will reduce hard, so keep a little extra wine or water at hand to loosen it.
- Currants are dried"Picked and washed currants" means dried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Picking over meant removing stalks and grit, which modern packaged fruit no longer needs.
- AlmondsSweet almonds, blanched by a minute in boiling water and slipped from their skins, then slivered. Bitter almonds are sometimes called for elsewhere in books of this date; they are not wanted here and are not generally available for culinary sale today.
- Lemon rindAn inch of thinly pared rind, no white pith. The recipe does not say to take it out, but it is worth fishing out before serving. A strip pared with a peeler is right; zest grated fine would be too assertive and cannot be fished out.
- NutmegAn eighth of a small nutmeg is roughly a scant quarter teaspoon grated. Grate it at the end of the simmer if you want the aroma to carry.
- YieldThe book says two or three persons, and that is honest: only a few tablespoons of thick sauce. Double or triple it for a family pudding, and expect to add liquid as it reduces.
Cassell's assigns national labels to sauces with a freedom that rarely survives scrutiny; in French kitchen usage à la polonaise almost always means buttered crumbs and chopped egg, nothing like this. What makes the sauce read as Central or Eastern European to a Victorian compiler is the combination of red wine, dried vine fruit, nutmeg and almonds, a flavour set that may well have suggested the sweet-sour wine sauces of Poland, Germany and Bohemia, and one that in England itself had largely retreated from the meat course into puddings by the middle of the nineteenth century. The costing, threepence exclusive of the wine, is typical of the book's method: Cassell's was written for households keeping accounts, and the wine is priced out separately.