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Claret Sauce
1 cup sugar 1/4 cup water 1/3 cup claret Boil sugar and water eight minutes; cool slightly, and add claret.
A three-ingredient dessert syrup that depends entirely on how far the sugar and water are cooked before the wine goes in.
- The hinge: cooling before the claretAdding wine to boiling syrup drives off the aroma and makes the hot syrup spatter. The recipe says only 'cool slightly'; letting it stand off the heat until the bubbling subsides, then stirring the claret in, follows that instruction.
- What claret meansIn American and British books of this period claret is red Bordeaux, or any dry red wine of that style. A modest dry red -- Cabernet, Merlot, a Rhone blend -- does the job; avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked.
- Eight minutes of boilingWith only a quarter cup of water to a cup of sugar, the syrup concentrates fast, and eight minutes of hard boiling can carry it past soft-ball. Use a wide pan and a thermometer if you have one, since pan shape and flame change the result considerably.
- If it sets too firmShould the cooled sauce be thick as candy, warm it gently with a tablespoon or two of water until it pours. Overshooting the syrup is the usual failure here.
- Alcohol stays inThe wine is never cooked, so the sauce is alcoholic. Worth knowing if it is going to a table with children.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly three-quarters to a cup, depending on how far the syrup was reduced -- enough for several servings of a steamed or baked pudding. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Wine sauces for puddings were standard in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks, sitting in the same chapter as hard sauce, foamy sauce and lemon sauce, and offered as the dressier option for a plain steamed pudding or a slice of cottage pudding. Claret in that era was a general term for red Bordeaux and for the lighter red wines sold in imitation of it, so the recipe assumed nothing more specific than a bottle of ordinary red in the sideboard. Sauces of this type also show how a boiled sugar syrup did the work now often given to cornstarch or butter: no thickener, no dairy, just sugar cooked to the right density and flavored at the last moment.