Home › Desserts › Cherry Sauce
Cherry Sauce
1/2 glass currant jelly juice and rind of 1/2 lemon. 1 inch stick cinnamon cherries and cook all ingredients 1 cup sugar
The text as scanned is scrambled — the ingredient list and the method have collapsed into one line, and the quantity of cherries has dropped out entirely. What survives is a standard jelly-thickened fruit sauce, and it can be reconstructed with a little judgement.
- Read it in the right orderThe sense is: a glass of currant jelly, the juice and rind of a lemon, a 1-inch stick of cinnamon, cherries, and 1 cup sugar — cook all ingredients together. Any other reading of the line produces nonsense.
- A "glass" of jellyCurrant jelly was sold and put up in tumblers or jelly glasses of roughly 8 ounces, so read this as about a cup, or one standard small jar. Older jelly glasses varied, so treat it as approximate.
- The missing cherriesNo quantity is given. For a cup of jelly and a cup of sugar, something on the order of a pound of pitted cherries would be a plausible proportion, though the recipe offers no guidance; sour rather than sweet cherries would suit the heavy sugar.
- Sugar is adjustableA full cup of sugar on top of a cup of jelly makes a very sweet sauce by current taste. With sweet cherries in place of sour, cut it back sharply and lean on the lemon.
- The lemon rindPare it in strips with a peeler rather than grating, so it can be lifted out with the cinnamon stick before serving. Take no white pith.
- Cooking timeThe jelly needs only to melt and the cherries to soften — five to ten minutes at a bare simmer. Cooked hard, the fruit falls apart and the sauce turns to jam.
- ThickeningThere is no starch here; the sauce sets from the pectin in the currant jelly and thickens further as it cools. Judge consistency cold, not hot.
- Yield and servicePerhaps two to three cups, depending on how much fruit is used. It suits vanilla ice cream, cornstarch or rice puddings, and plain steamed puddings; currant-jelly sauces of this general kind were also served warm with game and roast duck.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, the chocolate manufacturer, in the first decade of the twentieth century — one of the many house cookbooks a food firm published to keep its name in the kitchen. Currant jelly melted with lemon and a stick of cinnamon has a long association with game and roast duck in English and continental cookery, and by the turn of the century similar sauces were also being served over ice cream and moulded puddings. Currant jelly was a staple of the well-stocked pantry in a way it no longer is, often made at home from red currants, and its high pectin and sharp acidity let a cook thicken and brighten a sauce without flour or starch.