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Sauterne Sauce
1 cup sugar 1/2 cup water 4 tablespoons Sauterne Green coloring Make same as Claret Sauce, and color with leaf green.
A wine syrup for steamed and cabinet puddings, built exactly like the book's Claret Sauce with white wine in place of red and a drop of green coloring in place of the red wine's own tint.
- It depends on another recipeThe method is not given here at all; the recipe simply says to make it the same as the book's Claret Sauce. Read that entry first, since nothing on this page tells you how to proceed or how long to boil.
- The syrup stageOne cup sugar to half a cup water gives a thin syrup that thickens as it cools. No boiling time is given here; long boiling pushes it toward candy and the sauce will set hard on a cold pudding.
- Add the wine off the heatThe recipe does not say at what point the Sauterne goes in; stirring it into the syrup away from the burner will preserve more of the wine's aroma.
- Sauterne vs. SauternesIn American books of this period "Sauterne" without the final s often meant a domestic white wine rather than the botrytised dessert wine of Bordeaux, though the sweetness of those domestic bottlings varied. A dry-to-off-dry white works; if you use a true Sauternes, consider cutting the sugar.
- Leaf greenThis meant a bottled green food color from the grocer's shelf. A drop or two of modern gel coloring does the same job; the sauce is pale gold otherwise and the green is purely decorative.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup, enough for four to six servings. Serve warm over a plain steamed or cottage pudding; it does not thicken further and should pool rather than coat.
- Alcohol remainsThe wine is not boiled at length, so a good deal of the alcohol survives. Worth knowing before serving it to children.
Pudding sauces occupy their own chapter in nearly every American household manual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because the puddings themselves were deliberately plain: a boiled batter or a steamed bread pudding was cheap, and the sauce carried the flavor and the occasion. Wine sauces were the dressy end of that range, and a book that gives claret and Sauterne versions of the same sugar syrup is showing a cook how to vary one technique. The green coloring reflects a period taste for tinted foods that ran from pistachio ices to spun-sugar garnishes, and cheap bottled colors put it within reach of any kitchen. American wineries, particularly in California, borrowed European place names freely at the time, so the Sauterne on a 1900s sideboard was as likely to be domestic as French.