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Rose Sauce for Sweet Puddings, Etc
Take a fresh beetroot, peel it, and cut it into small pieces. Put these into a saucepan, pour over them a quart of cold water, and let them boil softly for half an hour. Add the strained juice and thin rind of a fresh lemon, two pounds of loaf sugar, and three or four drops of vanilla. Boil the sauce quickly until it forms a thick rose-coloured syrup, then strain it, and when it is cold mix with it a quarter of a pint of brandy. Bottle and store for use. Time to boil the syrup, about half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the brandy, 1s. 2d.
A Victorian store-cupboard syrup that colours and flavours a pudding at once. The whole point is the beet pigment, which is fragile, so the colour is the thing to manage.
- Keep the colourBetanin, the pigment in beetroot, degrades with prolonged heat and holds better in acid, which is one reason the lemon juice goes in before the fast boil. Stop the moment you have a syrup; pushed further the colour dulls.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in cones or hard blocks, broken up for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; use 2 lb (about 4 1/2 cups) by weight.
- Imperial measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 imperial fl oz (about 4 3/4 US cups). A quarter of a pint of brandy is 5 imperial fl oz, about 4 3/4 US fl oz -- a generous 1/2 cup.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means pared with a peeler so no white pith goes in; pith turns the syrup bitter over a long boil. Fish the strips out at straining.
- VanillaVictorian vanilla essences varied in strength, so three or four drops is hard to translate exactly; something in the region of 1/4 teaspoon of modern extract is a reasonable guess. Some of the aroma will be lost during the boil.
- Two boils, two purposesThe first half-hour is a gentle extraction of colour from the beet; the second is a hard reduction to syrup. Do not rush the first or the sauce will be pale, and give the second a brisk boil, since a bare simmer takes far longer to reduce.
- Brandy after coolingAdded hot, much of the alcohol would be driven off. It goes in cold for flavour, and it reinforces the heavy sugar load in preserving the bottled syrup.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of sugar boiled down to syrup gives appreciably more than a pint, so expect a bottle and a half rather than a bottle. With that sugar load and the brandy it should keep for months sealed, though refrigeration after opening is sensible; betanin fades in light, so store it dark.
- ServingA tablespoon or two spooned over steamed sponge, rice pudding, baked custard or plain ice cream. It is a pouring sauce, not a coating one.
Before coal-tar dyes became cheap and widespread in the later nineteenth century, a pink sauce meant beetroot, cochineal or red fruit. Cassell's was a large domestic dictionary aimed at middle-class kitchens, and this is a preparation to be made in quantity and bottled, so that a cook could produce a finished sauce for an unexpected pudding in seconds. The costing in shillings and pence, given "exclusive of the brandy," is characteristic of the book and suggests the spirit was reckoned an item already in the house. The name appears to be descriptive: rose for the colour, not for any rosewater.