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Currant Sauce
1 cup currant juice 2 tablespoons lemon juice water until syrupy; add currant juice Serve hot or cold.
A thin dessert syrup of the kind poured over steamed puddings, plain cake and vanilla ice cream. The method is a sugar syrup boiled to the point of thickening, then let down with fruit juice and finished with lemon.
- The sugar is unquantifiedSugar is not named in the list as printed at all, and no amount is given for the water, so no conversion can honestly be supplied; taste and judgment have to stand in for the missing figures.
- What "syrupy" meansThe book gives no temperature; "syrupy" is generally taken to mean about the thread stage, when a spoonful drawn up falls in a short thread rather than in drops. Boiled much beyond that the syrup will be too thick to pour as a sauce.
- Currant juiceRed currants, not the dried Zante currants sold in boxes, which are small raisins and yield no juice. Fresh or frozen red currants crushed and strained give the best flavour; bottled red currant juice or the liquid strained from a jar of currant jelly melted with a little water are workable substitutes.
- Add the juice off the heatFresh currant juice loses its bright colour and sharpness if boiled. Stir it into the finished syrup after the pan comes off the burner, and add the lemon juice last of all.
- Strain before servingIf the currant juice has been pressed rather than dripped it may still carry seeds and pulp; passing the finished sauce through a fine sieve will give a clearer result.
- Yield and servingServing -- No yield can be calculated, since neither the sugar nor the water is quantified. Served hot it suits steamed and boiled puddings; cold, it is a sauce for ice cream, blancmange or poached pears.
- KeepingRefrigerated in a covered jar it should hold several days, though the colour dulls with time.
Red currant sauces sit at the hinge between the sweet and the savoury in Anglo-American cooking. The same fruit went into the currant jelly served with mutton and game, and into sauces like this one poured over puddings. Red currants were a standard bush in nineteenth-century American kitchen gardens, prized because they are naturally high in pectin and acid and so keep well as jelly and syrup without much fuss; commercial planting collapsed in the early twentieth century when several states banned currants and gooseberries as hosts of white pine blister rust, which is a large part of why the fruit is unfamiliar to American cooks today. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book, a volume published to promote a chocolate manufacturer's products, is a reminder that such books were general household manuals first and advertising second: the dessert chapter had to cover the whole range of sauces a cook might want, chocolate or not.