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Currant Jelly Sauce (Cup sugar inch piece stick)
1 cup sugar 1 inch piece stick cinnamon 4 cup water ½ cup currant jelly Boil sugar, water and cinnamon until syrupy. move cinnamon; add jelly; when melted, strain and serve. Re- 2 cups milk 3 egg yolks 1 teaspoon butter
A two-minute dessert sauce for puddings, ice cream or steamed batter puddings. The text as printed has suffered in transcription, so a couple of figures need reading with care.
- The hinge: don't overboilSugar syrup with only a small amount of water passes from syrupy to caramel quickly. Cook it just until it coats a spoon thinly, then pull it off the heat before adding the jelly, or the sauce will set hard as it cools.
- "4 cup water" is a broken fraction"4 cup water" is probably a broken fraction -- the original likely read 1/4 or 3/4 cup; four cups of water to one cup of sugar would take a very long reduction to reach syrup. Judge by consistency rather than trusting the printed number.
- The trailing line belongs elsewhere"2 cups milk, 3 egg yolks, 1 teaspoon butter" is a stray ingredient list from a neighbouring recipe, picked up in transcription. It has nothing to do with this sauce.
- "Re- move cinnamon"The word is split across a line break in the original: remove the cinnamon stick before adding the jelly. A single inch of stick cassia or true cinnamon is plenty for this volume.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, not blackcurrant preserve and not dried Zante currants. Any tart, well-set jelly stands in; if using a softer modern jelly the sauce will be thinner, so reduce the syrup a little further first.
- Strain while hotJelly carries pectin skin and fruit fragments that will not dissolve. Pass it through a fine sieve straight after melting, since a cooling currant sauce thickens and clogs the mesh.
- YieldRoughly a cup of finished sauce, enough for several servings. It needs gentle rewarming to pour once cold.
Currant jelly sauce belongs to a family of clear fruit sauces that nineteenth-century American cookbooks used the way we now use a coulis: poured over cornstarch blancmange, cottage pudding, or a steamed roll. Red currants were a standard dooryard fruit in the northeastern United States and set to a firm jelly without added pectin because of their own high pectin and acid, which is why jars of it were a common enough cellar item that so many recipes assume you already have some. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's promotional book, and its dessert chapter fills out the chocolate recipes with the general repertoire of sauces a household would need. Currant bushes were widely destroyed in the United States in the early twentieth century under state bans meant to check white pine blister rust, which is a large part of why the fruit is uncommon in American markets today.