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Sauce for Ginger Bread
1 C sugar 1 T butter 1/2 C cream or milk 5. T grape juice Cream sugar and butter, add cream and grape juice and cook until creamy. Flavor with vanilla or nutmeg. Serve on ginger bread.
A quick stovetop dessert sauce, close to a thin butterscotch, poured warm over a square of gingerbread. Sugar, butter, dairy and grape juice cooked to a pourable syrup.
- The abbreviationsC is cup and T is tablespoon, so this is 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1/2 cup cream or milk, and 5 tablespoons grape juice. The stray period after the 5 is a typesetting artifact, not a fraction.
- The hinge: gentle heatGrape juice is acidic and dairy can curdle if the pan gets hot fast. It is safer to warm the butter and sugar with the juice, add the cream once the pan is off a hard boil, and hold the sauce at a bare simmer, stirring, until it thickens -- though the recipe as written has the cream and juice going in together.
- "Cream sugar and butter"With only a tablespoon of butter to a cup of sugar this will never fluff like a cake batter. Work them together to a damp sand, then proceed; nothing is lost if you simply melt them together instead.
- How thick is "creamy"The recipe gives no time; roughly five to eight minutes at a simmer is a reasonable guide, cooking until the sauce coats the back of a spoon and leaves a clear track when you draw a finger through it. It thickens further as it cools, so stop while it still pours.
- Grape juiceUse unsweetened bottled Concord grape juice, not a grape drink or cocktail; the sweetened kinds push an already very sweet sauce over the edge. The color will be a dull mauve-brown, which is normal.
- FlavoringVanilla goes in off the heat so it does not cook away; nutmeg can go in early. A teaspoon of vanilla or a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg suits this quantity.
- YieldAbout 1 cup, enough for six to eight servings of gingerbread. Serve warm; it stiffens in the refrigerator and needs a gentle rewarming with a splash of milk.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American gingerbread was rarely eaten bare — it came with a hot sauce, a lemon sauce, or plain whipped cream, and church cookbooks like this one often give space to such sauces because they stretched a plain cake into a dessert. The grape juice here is worth noting: unfermented bottled grape juice was promoted in Protestant circles as a substitute for wine, both at communion and in cooking, and its commercial success is generally traced to the Welch family's late-nineteenth-century pasteurized product.