Guava Sauce
This may be made with the cooked or fresh guavas.
Peel and put through a coarse sieve or fruit crusher to remove the seeds. The pulp resulting a smooth massmay be mixed with sugar alone or with the addition of a little lime or lemon juice or spice. Serve as with applesauce. The white of an egg may be whipped stiff and added if liked.
A one-paragraph formula rather than a recipe, of the kind fruit-preserving manuals printed when guavas were a common dooryard crop. The work is all in the sieving; everything after that is seasoning to taste.
- The hinge: get the seeds outGuava seeds are hard enough to crack a tooth and will not soften with cooking. Press the pulp through a medium sieve or the finest plate of a food mill, then scrape and discard what stays behind. A blender will pulverise the seeds into gritty specks instead of removing them.
- "Fruit crusher"Some form of fruit press or mill; the recipe does not say which. A modern food mill, potato ricer or a stiff spoon against a sieve all do the job.
- Cooked or freshFully ripe fruit (yielding to the thumb, strongly perfumed) sieves raw. Anything still firm should be simmered with a splash of water for 10-15 minutes until soft, then sieved warm, which passes far more easily.
- Sugar, unspecifiedThe original gives no quantity because guava ranges from sharp to honey-sweet. Start at 2 tablespoons per cup of pulp, stir until dissolved, then taste.
- Lime or lemonThe recipe leaves it optional, but about 2 teaspoons per cup lifts the flavour and helps keep the pulp from browning, since guava oxidises quickly once sieved.
- "Or spice"Most likely cinnamon, a scrape of nutmeg, or clove. The recipe adds it to the sieved pulp along with the sugar and juice.
- The whipped egg whiteThis turns the sauce into a light fruit fool, but it goes in raw and is never heated. Use pasteurised whites if you want the effect, or fold in lightly whipped cream instead; children, pregnant women and anyone immune-compromised should skip it.
- Yield and servingA pound of guavas gives somewhere around a cup or more of sieved pulp, a few servings. "Serve as with applesauce" suggests the same uses: cold or barely warm, alongside pork, ham or roast poultry, or spooned over plain cake.
Guava recipes of this kind turn up in American fruit and preserving books of the period, and guava jelly and guava paste were familiar shop goods before fresh guavas were widely available. The instruction to "serve as with applesauce" teaches an unfamiliar fruit by mapping it onto a dish every reader already knew. The optional whipped egg white recalls the English fruit fool, in which sieved fruit pulp was lightened and served as a simple dessert.