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Maraschino Sauce
2 cups boiling water 2 tablespoons maraschino Mix sugar, arrowroot and boiling water; boil ten minutes. Add maraschino. Chill and serve. Orange Sauce No. I grated rind, juice, and pulp of 3 3 egg whites oranges cup powdered sugar 1 tablespoon lemon juice Beat whites until stiff; add remaining ingredients.
Serve cold.
Orange Sauce No. 2 Make the same as Lemon Sauce, substituting the juice and rind of two oranges for lemon.
The page has come through with several quantities lost, and the three sauces on it behave quite differently. Read the arrowroot note first, because the ten-minute boil is the one instruction that will spoil the sauce.
- Missing quantitiesThe transcription gives only the 2 cups boiling water and 2 tablespoons maraschino; the amounts of sugar and arrowroot have dropped out, as has the sugar quantity in Orange Sauce No. 1 ("cup powdered sugar" was almost certainly a fraction). For a pourable dessert sauce of this type the usual proportion is about 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon arrowroot to 2 cups water, but that is an inference, not what the book says.
- Do not boil arrowroot ten minutesArrowroot thickens the moment it reaches a simmer and then breaks down under prolonged heat, thinning again and losing its clear gloss. Bring it just to the boil, hold it under a minute, and take it off. The ten minutes in the original suits cornstarch far better than arrowroot.
- Add the liqueur off the heatThe maraschino goes in after cooking for a reason: its aroma is volatile and boiling it off leaves only sweetness. Stir it into the sauce once it has stopped bubbling, then chill.
- What maraschino isA clear, faintly bitter, almond-scented liqueur distilled from Marasca cherries and their crushed stones, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo and Maraska are the versions usually on the shelf. Jarred cherry syrup will make a much sweeter, duller sauce.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for eight to ten servings. It is a thin, glossy pouring sauce meant for cold puddings, blancmange, poached fruit, plain cake or ice cream.
- Orange Sauce No. 1 is rawThat sauce is uncooked beaten egg white, never heated at any point and served cold. It carries the same salmonella risk as any raw-egg preparation and would not be written this way now; if you want a foamy orange sauce, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked base.
- Orange Sauce No. 2 depends on a recipe not on this pageIt refers back to the book's Lemon Sauce, which is printed elsewhere and is not reproduced here. Without that entry the instruction is unusable on its own.
Maraschino reached American dessert tables as an imported luxury: a colorless cherry-stone liqueur long associated with Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, where it was commercialized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and shipped in straw-wrapped bottles. It appears as a flavoring in genteel American cookery of the period, and a clear arrowroot sauce was one way to carry that flavor onto a molded pudding or ice. Arrowroot itself signals the period: prized because it set to a transparent jelly rather than the cloudy paste of flour or cornstarch, it was also considered gentle enough for invalids and children, which is part of why turn-of-the-century books lean on it for dessert sauces. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, one of many manufacturer-sponsored volumes of the era.