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Kirsch Sauce
Use rule for Stirling Sauce, substituting one fourth cup kirsch for wine.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's Stirling Sauce in front of you. Almost everything worth knowing here concerns the kirsch itself and when it goes in.
- You need the base recipe firstThis entry gives no ingredients of its own. Find Stirling Sauce elsewhere in the book and follow it, using one fourth cup kirsch in place of the wine at the point the wine would have been added.
- One fourth cupFour tablespoons, 60 ml. That is a substantial pour of 40-percent spirit into a small dessert sauce, and it will read as noticeably stronger than the same volume of sherry or madeira.
- Buy the right bottleKirsch, or kirschwasser, is a dry unsweetened cherry brandy, clear and sharp. It is not the same as the sweet red cherry liqueurs sold under similar names, which would throw both the sugar balance and the colour.
- Add it off the heatKirsch is valued for aroma rather than body, and that aroma is the first thing to boil away. Stir it in at the end, with the pan off the burner, whatever the base recipe's rhythm suggests.
- If the base sauce is creamed rather than cookedSome butter-and-sugar dessert sauces are beaten cold, in which case add the spirit a spoonful at a time or the emulsion may separate. Add slowly and keep beating.
- Alcohol does not cook offIf it is added at the end and never boiled, most of the spirit remains in the sauce. Worth knowing before serving it to children or to anyone avoiding alcohol.
Kirschwasser is distilled from whole small black cherries, stones included, which is where its faint bitter-almond edge comes from; the tradition is centred on the Black Forest, Alsace and northern Switzerland, and the German name simply means cherry water. American cookbooks of the period treat it as one of a short list of respectable flavouring spirits alongside sherry, madeira and maraschino, and dessert chapters of the period often print a single base sauce followed by a string of one-line variants like this one, each naming a different bottle. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer.