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Fruit Juice Sauce
Take ½ pint of any kind of fruit juice (apricot, peach, etc.) and add 1 teaspoon Five Roses flour and½ cup sugar. Mix well, boil 5 minutes and strain. ½ cup butter
A thrift sauce built on the syrup left from canned or stewed fruit, thickened with a spoonful of flour. The printing is garbled at the end, which is the main thing to sort out before you start.
- The stray butterThe "½ cup butter" is set off at the end of the line, almost certainly a typesetting slip that belongs in the ingredient list. Stir it in off the heat after straining, a piece at a time, so it emulsifies rather than pooling. Half a cup to one cup of juice makes a very rich sauce; 2 to 4 tablespoons is closer to modern taste.
- Half a pintIn American measure one cup, 8 fluid ounces. The book is Canadian, so the imperial half-pint of 10 fl oz may be meant, giving a slightly thinner sauce; either will work.
- Fruit juice means syrupAt the time this meant the sweetened liquid drained from home-canned or stewed apricots and peaches, not bottled juice. Modern canned-fruit syrup works directly; unsweetened juice will need the full ½ cup of sugar, while heavy syrup needs much less.
- Mix the flour coldWhisk the teaspoon of flour into a little of the cold juice first, then add the rest. Dropped into hot liquid it lumps, and straining will remove the lumps but take the thickening with them.
- Why five minutesFlour needs a sustained boil to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power. One teaspoon per cup gives a pouring sauce, not a pudding-thick one; use two if you want it to coat.
- YieldA good cup and a quarter or more, enough for four to six servings over steamed pudding, baked custard or plain cake. Serve warm, as butter-finished sauces separate and set as they cool.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and sold or given away with sacks of Five Roses flour, which is why a teaspoon of the brand's flour is specified in a sauce where any flour would do; such mill-sponsored books are often said to have been among the most widely circulated cookbooks in Canadian homes in the early twentieth century. A whole section of pudding sauces made sense in a kitchen where a boiled or steamed pudding closed most dinners, and each needed something poured over it. The use of fruit syrup rather than juice as such points to the household canning cupboard: apricots and peaches put up in sugar syrup left a sweet liquid too good to discard, and thickening it with a little flour and enriching it with butter turned a byproduct into a dessert sauce at almost no cost.