Jelly Sauce
2 T jelly Small piece butter Stir well, add 1¼ C boiling water-boil until thick stirring continually. Elizabeth Kohner.
A pudding sauce of the plainest sort, printed here in a compressed and partly garbled form typical of church-supper cookbooks set in tight columns. Read it as two things: a boiled jelly sauce, and a second set of ingredients that almost certainly belongs to a foamy or hard sauce printed alongside it.
- The line break problem"2 eggs, 1 C powdered sugar" appears after the contributor's name and has no instructions attached to it. It is either the head of the next recipe in the column or an alternate uncooked sauce; nothing in the method uses eggs. Make the jelly sauce from the first three ingredients and ignore the trailing pair.
- "14 C" is 1/4 cup"14 C" is almost certainly 1/4 cup -- the fraction has been lost somewhere between the page and this transcription. A quarter cup of boiling water against two tablespoons of jelly gives a sauce that will actually thicken; a full cup and a quarter would stay watery no matter how long it boiled.
- T and CT is a level tablespoon, C a cup of 8 fluid ounces. "Small piece butter" means roughly a tablespoon, about half an ounce.
- Which jellyCurrant jelly was a common choice for pudding sauces of this kind. Any firm, tart, well-set jelly works; a soft freezer jam or a jelly heavy with pectin syrup will not give the same clean gloss.
- The hinge: keep stirring, stop earlyThis is a very small quantity of liquid over direct heat. It goes from syrup to scorched sugar in under a minute of inattention. Stir without pause and pull it the moment it coats the spoon, well short of anything resembling a candy stage.
- Yield and useAbout a third of a cup, enough for two to four servings. It is a hot sauce for steamed or cottage pudding, bread pudding, or plain cake, spooned over at the table. It thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Community cookbooks like this one were compiled by church women's societies and sold to fund a building repair, a mission, or the minister's salary, with each contributor's name printed beside her recipe as both credit and inducement to buy. That format explains the terseness here: Elizabeth Kohner was writing for neighbors who already knew what a pudding sauce should look like, so she gave quantities and skipped everything else. Sauces of this sort accompanied steamed and baked puddings, which were themselves too plain to serve bare. Jelly sauce was the thriftiest of the lot, turning two spoonfuls from a jar put up the previous summer into a sauce for the table.