Home › CHAPTER XIII › CHAPTER XIII: Sauce
CHAPTER XIII: Sauce
STRAINED APPLE SAUCE Pare, quarter and core three or four tart apples; add half a cup of boiling water, cover and let cook till tender. With a pestle press the apples through a sieve; add about one-fourth a cup of sugar (a grating of nutmeg if desired) and let cook three or four minutes.
STEWED PRUNES Wash one-third or one-half a pound of prunes, rubbing them between the hands, rinse in cold water and drain; then cover with cold water and let stand several hours or over night. Set to cook in the water in which they were standing, adding more if needed. Let simmer until they are tender and the water is reduced. Just before removing from the fire add from one-fourth to one-half a cup of sugar and let simmer six or eight minutes. The sugar may be omitted and often be unmissed. The juice from half a lemon, a little candied orange or lemon rind, or a tablespoonful or two of sherry, may be added occasionally, to give variety to the flavor. The blanched pits from the stones also give a pleasing flavor.
EVAPORATED PEACHES Prepare and cook the peaches in the same manner as the prunes; one-fourth a pound is enough to cook at one time. These are particularly good, served with cream.
DRIED FIGS Use figs that come in small baskets, or such as have a thin, silky skin. Wash the figs, pour boiling water over them and let cook until the skins are tender. For half a dozen figs, add a scant quarter a cup of sugar and let boil five minutes. Flavor with lemon or orange juice, or sherry, for a change. Serve with or without cream.
Four small fruit sauces built on the same method: soften the fruit in water, sweeten at the end, serve warm or cold. The proportions are for two people, so everything here is a half-batch by modern standards.
- Add sugar last, and brieflyIn all four recipes the sugar goes in only at the end, after the fruit is tender, and three to eight minutes of simmering is all that follows: enough to dissolve it and thicken the syrup. Sugar added early is generally held to firm the skins and cell walls of fruit and slow softening, though the book gives no reason for the order.
- The sieve and pestleFor the apple sauce, a food mill or a coarse sieve with a stiff spatula does the same work in less time. Pass the pulp while it is still hot; it stiffens as it cools and resists the sieve.
- ApplesThree or four apples is perhaps 1 to 1 1/4 lb depending on size. Any tart cooking apple works; Bramley or Granny Smith break down readily with half a cup of water in a covered pan, roughly 15-20 minutes.
- Prunes have changedThe dried prunes sold today are pitted and partly rehydrated, and rarely need an overnight soak. An hour in cold water, then 20-30 minutes at a bare simmer, brings them to the point the recipe describes. Judge by texture, not the clock.
- Do not use the kernelsThe optional "blanched pits from the stones" are plum kernels, which contain amygdalin and release hydrogen cyanide when crushed and wetted. The almond-like flavor the book is after comes safely from a drop of almond extract; leave the kernels out.
- Evaporated peaches"Evaporated" generally meant dried by artificial heat rather than in the sun. Ordinary dried peach halves are the modern equivalent; a quarter pound is roughly three-quarters of a cup, and they may take longer than prunes to soften.
- The figsSmall figs with thin skins suggests the imported Smyrna type sold in baskets; dried Calimyrna figs are the nearest modern equivalent. Tough-skinned figs are slow to tenderize, so choose by feel before you start.
- YieldEach of these makes about two servings. Served with cream, as the book suggests for the peaches and figs, they are dessert; the prunes, with the sugar omitted as the book allows, would do as an accompaniment or a breakfast dish.
Cooking for Two came out of the Boston Cooking School circle in the first decade of the twentieth century, aimed at the small household rather than the large family most cookbooks still assumed. "Sauce" here carries its older American sense of stewed fruit served as an accompaniment or a light dessert, rather than a poured liquid. Dried fruit is the point of the chapter. Before reliable year-round produce, prunes, evaporated peaches and imported figs were the winter fruit of the northern household, cheap, shelf-stable and improved by nothing more than water, heat and a little sugar. The suggested variations -- a squeeze of lemon, a spoonful of sherry -- are of a piece with the period's advice for giving variety to a monotonous larder, as the recipe itself says.