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Cherry Float
Thicken the juice from a quart of stewed and sweetened cherries with a teacup of cornstarch dissolved in cherry juice (cold) or cold water. Add juice of a lemon or orange and when cooled pour over the cherries which should be ready in the serving dish.
A simple cornstarch-thickened cherry sauce poured back over the fruit. Only two things need attention: the cornstarch quantity, which as printed is almost certainly a misreading, and the fact that the starch has to boil to thicken at all.
- The teacup of cornstarchTaken literally this is a very large amount: a teacup was reckoned at anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz, and that much cornstarch would set a quart of juice into a sliceable block. The line more plausibly means the starch dissolved in a teacup of cold liquid, though the wording is ambiguous. About 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch per pint of juice gives a pourable sauce, 4 gives a soft pudding.
- Slaking the starchCornstarch must be stirred smooth into cold juice or water before it meets anything hot, or it seizes into lumps that never disperse. Add the slurry to the simmering juice in a thin stream while whisking.
- It has to boilCornstarch only thickens fully as the liquid approaches boiling, and about a minute at that heat cooks out the raw, chalky taste. Do not pull the pan at the first sign of thickening.
- Acid at the endBetter to add the lemon or orange juice after the starch has thickened and the pan is off the heat, since prolonged boiling with acid breaks cornstarch down and the sauce thins again. The original says only that the juice goes in before the sauce cools.
- Which cherriesSour cherries such as Morello or Montmorency are the likely intent, stewed with enough sugar to be palatable; the recipe specifies neither variety nor quantity. Sweet cherries need far less sugar and a sharper hit of lemon to keep the finished dish from being flat.
- A quart of stewed cherriesRoughly 1.5 to 2 lb of fresh fruit, pitted; jarred sour cherries in juice are the easiest modern route, since the recipe wants the juice separately anyway.
- Cooling and skinA cornstarch sauce forms a rubbery film as it cools. Lay plastic wrap directly on the surface, or stir once or twice while it comes down, then pour over the fruit.
- YieldServes six as a dessert, in glasses or a shallow bowl, with cream or a plain sponge cake alongside.
"Float" in nineteenth-century American cookery meant a dish where one element rides on another — most often a snow or whipped custard floating on fruit or juice, as in the older English floating island. Cornstarch itself was a comparatively new convenience, manufactured on an industrial scale in the United States from the 1840s onward and heavily promoted for exactly this sort of quick pudding and sauce, alongside older methods of thickening fruit juice with arrowroot, sago or long reduction. Sour cherries were the default in these books because they were the ones that grew reliably in northern orchards and the ones that canned well, and a compiler would have expected readers to be working through a summer glut.