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SAUCE (Reduce one gill of the syrup)
Reduce one gill of the syrup from the pine-apple, add one ounce of loaf sugar, and one glass of sherry; colour with cochineal; pour round the pudding. Some small pieces of pine-apple may be added to the sauce.
A short accompaniment sauce, written to follow a pineapple pudding elsewhere in the book and assuming you have a tin or a compote of pineapple to hand. The whole thing is four ingredients and about five minutes at the stove.
- A gill5 fl oz in British imperial measure, a shade over half a US cup (about 140 ml). That is the syrup from a tin of pineapple, or the poaching syrup if the fruit was cooked at home.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, sold in the period as a solid cone or block to be cut and crushed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the same thing; one ounce is about two tablespoons.
- A glass of sherryA wine glass in Victorian and Edwardian kitchen usage is roughly 2 fl oz. Use a medium or sweet sherry — an oloroso or amontillado — rather than fino, which will read as thin against the pineapple.
- Order of operationsReduce the syrup first, then add the sugar and the sherry off the boil. Reducing after the wine goes in cooks off the aromatics that are the point of adding it.
- How far to reduceThe instruction gives no target. Take the half cup down by about a third, until it coats the back of a spoon lightly; it should pour and spread around the pudding, not sit in a mound.
- CochinealA red colouring made from the dried insect Dactylopius coccus, still sold as carmine or E120 and still used commercially. It is not vegetarian and is a recognised allergen for a small number of people. A drop of red food colouring does the same job, or leave it out — the sauce is pale gold without it.
- The pineapple piecesAdd them at the very end, warmed through only. Simmering fresh pineapple in the sauce is fine, but its bromelain will do nothing useful and the fruit collapses; tinned pineapple is already cooked and needs no more than a minute.
- YieldSomething over half a cup of finished sauce once the reduced syrup and the sherry are combined -- enough to ring one moulded pudding, poured at the table.
Coloured dessert sauces of this kind belong to the high-Victorian and Edwardian dining room, where a moulded pudding was expected to arrive ringed by a pool of contrasting sauce rather than sitting bare on the dish. Pineapple in a British kitchen of roughly this period often meant tinned fruit, though imported fresh pineapple was also reaching British markets by steamship: canning had brought the pineapple down from the hothouse curiosity of the great estates — grown in pits at enormous cost — to something a cook could open, and the syrup left in the tin was too good to discard. Cochineal was the standard red of the professional kitchen long before synthetic dyes were trusted for food, imported from Mexico and later the Canary Islands, and cookery writers of the period call for it freely. The sherry is the same instinct that puts it in trifle and tipsy cake: a fortified wine keeps in an open bottle in a way that table wine does not, which made it the household cook's default for sweetening and perfuming a sauce.