Home › The Principles of Cookery › RASPBERRY SAUCE (a Danish recipe)
RASPBERRY SAUCE (a Danish recipe)
Take some raspberries, put them in a cloth, and wring them to express the juice; to this add sugar, wine, and a little water; set the mixture on the fire; when it boils add a spoonful of potato flour mixed with cold water, and give it one boil up.
A thickened fruit sauce of the kind Danish cooks made by the potful in berry season. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a method and scale to what you have.
- Working proportionsFor 1 lb (450 g) raspberries expect roughly 250-300 ml of juice. Start with 60-75 g sugar, 100 ml light red or white wine and 50 ml water, then taste. That yields about 400 ml, enough for six servings over pudding or ice cream.
- Potato flour is potato starchSold today as potato starch or kartoffelmel; cornflour is the nearest substitute but sets cloudier and duller. Reckon on 1 level teaspoon of starch slaked in a tablespoon of cold water per 250 ml of liquid for a pouring sauce.
- "One boil up" is the hingePotato starch thickens the instant it hits boiling liquid and then breaks down if held there. Let it come up once, pull the pan off the heat, and stop. Prolonged simmering gives a thin, slack sauce that will not recover.
- Extracting the juiceThe cloth-wringing method gives clear juice but wastes a good deal of fruit. Crushing the berries with the sugar first, letting them stand twenty minutes, then pressing through a fine sieve gets more juice and better colour; a jelly bag works if you want it perfectly clear.
- The wineThe recipe says only "wine", with no indication of type. Anything light and fruity works; sherry or port shifts it heavier. Alcohol will not fully cook off in a single boil, so use grape juice with a squeeze of lemon if that matters.
- ServingServe warm over steamed or baked puddings, or chilled with cream, where it sets to a light gel as it cools. If it stiffens too much in the fridge, thin with a spoonful of water rather than reboiling.
Fruit juice sweetened, thinned and bound with potato starch is the backbone of Danish rødgrød, the red berry pudding usually served with cream, and this sauce is essentially the same preparation kept loose. Potato starch was widely used as a Scandinavian thickener by the nineteenth century, and it suits fruit better than flour or arrowroot because it thickens at a lower temperature and leaves the colour bright and the flavour clean. Cassell's, compiled in late Victorian London for a readership that liked its cookery cosmopolitan, collected such short foreign notes throughout the dictionary, often reduced to a few lines with no quantities.