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Fruit Sauce
1 cup raisins and currants (chopped finely) 1¼ cups boiling water 1 cup sugar ½ cup butter Vanilla Bring to a boil and flavor with vanilla.
Any fruit may be used in above recipe instead of raisins and currants.
A nice fruit sauce is made by melting a glass of quince jelly, to which add the same quantity of water and a little butter, also a pinch of cinnamon.
A pudding sauce of the simplest kind: dried fruit, sugar, butter and water boiled together until glossy. Two versions are given, the second built on melted jelly.
- Currants means driedThese are Zante currants — small dried grapes sold beside the raisins — not fresh red or black currants. Chop them with the raisins so no single piece dominates a spoonful of sauce.
- A glass of jellyThe second version measures by the jelly tumbler of the period, about 6 to 8 fl oz. A standard 8 oz jar of quince jelly, plus the same volume of water and a tablespoon or so of butter, matches the intent.
- How long to boilThe recipe says only to bring it to a boil. A few minutes at a simmer will plump the fruit and give the liquid some body; boiled hard and long, a cup of sugar in this much water will reduce toward a candy syrup as it cools.
- Add the vanilla off the heatThe instruction to boil then flavor is worth following literally. Extract stirred in after the pan leaves the burner keeps its aroma; boiled with the sugar it flattens out.
- Butter is half the pointHalf a cup of butter to a cup of sugar makes this closer to a hard sauce in disguise. The recipe boils the butter in with everything else; whisking it in off the heat instead may help the sauce hold together rather than throwing a slick of fat on top.
- Substituting other fruitFor dried apricots, figs or dates, the recipe works as written. For fresh berries or stone fruit, cut the water back to about ½ cup, since the fruit releases its own.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly 3 cups. Serve warm over steamed pudding, cottage pudding, plain cake or baked apples; it thickens noticeably on standing and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Pudding sauces occupy their own chapter in many North American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, alongside the puddings they accompanied — steamed, boiled, or baked plain in a pan. The sauce carried the sugar, the butter and the flavor, and the chapter structure suggests a cook might have had several within easy reach: hard sauce, foamy sauce, lemon sauce, and this sort of boiled fruit sauce. The quince variant is a period tell. Quince was a common dooryard fruit in Ontario, Quebec and the northeastern states, too astringent to eat raw but exceptionally high in pectin, so it was put up as jelly in quantity every autumn; melting that jelly back down with water and butter turned a preserve shelf into a sauce shelf. The Five Roses book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, gathered recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the loose measure — "a glass" of jelly — and the confidence that any fruit will do.