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Caramel Sauce
1 cup boiling water Caramelize sugar in clean saucepan. When a light brown color, add water, and simmer fifteen minutes. 1½ cups cherries 1 cup claret ½ cup sugar Remove stones from together until syrupy. Strain and serve.
The type on this page has collapsed two separate recipes into one another: a caramel sauce (sugar, boiling water) and a cherry-claret sauce (cherries, claret, sugar). Read them as two, and the instructions make sense again.
- Untangling the textThe caramel sauce is: caramelize sugar in a clean saucepan, and when it is light brown add 1 cup boiling water and simmer fifteen minutes. The cherry sauce is: remove stones from 1½ cups cherries, cook with 1 cup claret and ½ cup sugar until syrupy, strain and serve.
- The missing quantityNo amount of sugar is given for the caramel. Roughly a cup of sugar to the cup of water will give a pourable syrup; less sugar gives a thinner one.
- Caramelizing dry sugarThe hinge is the color. Sugar melted alone goes from clear to light brown to acrid black in under a minute at the end. Pull it at the shade of a copper penny, off heat, because the residual heat in the pan keeps it darkening.
- Adding the waterBoiling water is specified for a reason: cold water hitting molten sugar seizes it into a lump and throws steam violently. Add it in a slow stream, at arm's length, and stand back from the eruption.
- The fifteen-minute simmerThis is not overcooking; it is dissolving the hardened caramel back into syrup and reducing it to sauce consistency. Expect a thin syrup while hot that thickens noticeably as it cools.
- ClaretIn 1907 American usage, claret meant a dry red Bordeaux or any dry red in that style. Any dry, unoaked red works; the sugar is doing the sweetening.
- Straining the cherry sauceStraining leaves a clear, syrupy sauce and discards the spent fruit. If you would rather keep the cherries whole, lift them out once tender, reduce the liquid, then return them.
- YieldEach sauce makes something close to a cup, allowing for reduction and, in the cherry sauce, for the strained-out fruit -- enough for four to six servings over ice cream, custard, or plain cake.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by food companies to sell their product — here, chocolate and cocoa — while offering a genuinely complete household manual around it. A dessert chapter of that period commonly carried a short battery of sauces like these two, in keeping with what is often said to have been the shape of the American sweet course: a plain foundation (ice cream, cornstarch pudding, steamed cake) dressed by a sauce. The pairing of a burnt-sugar sauce with a wine-and-fruit sauce on one page is typical: one costs pennies and some careful attention at the stove, the other signals a table with a bottle of claret in the house.