Home › The Cherry › German Cherry Sauce
German Cherry Sauce
Crush a pound of cherries with the seeds until the "meat of the pits" is tender, then put through coarse sieve, add one pint of wine with as much sugar as desired, and boil till thick as cream.
This may be spiced if liked.
This is a cooked fruit sauce, but the instruction that defines it — crushing the stones until the kernels inside are broken down and steeping them in the liquid — is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The "meat of the pits" is the problemCherry kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. Whole pits swallowed accidentally pass through intact; deliberately pulping them, as this recipe directs, is what liberates the compound.
- Sieving does not remove itStraining takes out the shell fragments but not what has already dissolved into the pulp and wine. The subsequent boiling drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but the recipe gives no control over how much, and the sauce is reduced rather than open-boiled at length.
- No measured marginA pound of cherries carries several dozen stones, the number depending on variety and size. Cyanide content varies by variety, ripeness and how thoroughly the kernels are broken, so there is no way to say from this text whether a serving is trivial or not. Use a current cherry sauce recipe instead.
- The flavour being soughtWhat the cook wanted was the bitter-almond note of the kernel, the same aroma found in marzipan and noyau. Modern kitchens get it from almond extract or a few drops of natural benzaldehyde, which carry the scent without the glycoside.
- Reading the rest of the recipeA pint is two cups. The recipe specifies only 'wine'; a still red or a sweet white is the likeliest reading, though the text does not say. 'Thick as cream' means pouring consistency, not jam. 'Spiced if liked' is left entirely to the cook, and would most plausibly have meant something like cinnamon, clove or lemon peel.
- Where it was goingSauces of this kind were served warm over puddings, rice, dumplings and roast game, rather than eaten by the spoonful.
German cookery has a long habit of treating the cherry stone as an ingredient rather than a waste product: Kirschsauce, cherry soups and the old Kaltschale all lean on the almond-like perfume that comes from the kernel, and the same instinct produced kirschwasser, which is distilled from mashed cherries stones and all. The technique is often said to have travelled to American kitchens with German immigrants, and it turns up in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century compilations like this one. Amygdalin had been isolated from bitter almonds in 1830 and the hazard of the kernels was known to chemists well before this book was printed, but domestic manuals were slow to absorb the point, and recipes calling for crushed stones stayed in print for decades. The line "as much sugar as desired" is equally of its time — a household sauce was expected to be adjusted to whatever the cherries and the cook's palate demanded.