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Raspberry Sauce
1 1/2 cups raspberry juice 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 1/2 tablespoons water Heat the juice from the canned berries, and add the cornstarch moistened with the water, stirring meanwhile. When thickened, cook fifteen to twenty minutes, in a double boiler. If the fruit juice is not sufficiently sweetened, add sugar.
A cornstarch-thickened fruit sauce of the plainest kind, meant for puddings, blancmange and steamed desserts. The only real skill is in cooking the starch out without scorching it.
- The hinge: cook the starch fullyThe fifteen to twenty minutes in a double boiler are not padding. Cornstarch tastes chalky and raw until it has held heat long enough to hydrate completely, and a double boiler prevents the sugar and fruit acid from catching on the bottom. A heatproof bowl over barely simmering water does the same job.
- Acid thins cornstarchRaspberry juice is acidic, and prolonged cooking in acid breaks starch chains down, so a sauce that thickens beautifully at five minutes can slacken by twenty. Thicken first, then hold it over the water gently rather than at a hard boil, and expect a pourable sauce rather than a set one.
- "Juice from the canned berries"The recipe expects juice drained from a jar of canned berries, likely packed in syrup, though it explicitly allows for juice that is not sweet enough. Modern canned raspberries in light syrup work; so does bottled raspberry juice or thawed frozen berries pressed through a sieve, with sugar added to taste.
- Slurry proportionsTwo tablespoons cornstarch to 1 1/2 cups liquid is a firm, coating consistency, closer to a pudding sauce than a drizzle. Use one tablespoon for something you want to pour over ice cream. The 1 1/2 tablespoons of water is only enough to make a paste; add it cold and stir smooth before it goes anywhere near the hot juice.
- Seeds and clarityStraining the juice through a fine sieve before thickening gives a clear, glossy sauce. Raspberry seeds left in will settle and give a gritty finish once the sauce cools.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight dessert portions. Serve warm over cornstarch pudding, rice pudding or plain cake; it thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of water.
Cornstarch-thickened fruit sauces filled a specific gap in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American kitchen: they gave a bright, sweet accompaniment to the many bland moulded puddings of the era without calling for eggs, cream or butter. Vegetarian and reform cookery of the period, which may owe something to health-reform movements and to the growing commercial availability of packaged cornstarch, leaned heavily on starch thickening as a substitute for the custards and rich sauces of conventional cooking, though plain cornstarch fruit sauces appear in mainstream cookery of the period just as readily. The reliance on canned berries is equally of its moment — a winter jar of raspberries put up the previous summer was one way to get that flavour onto the table out of season.