Home › Frozen Desserts › Cherry Sauce for Ices
Cherry Sauce for Ices
Stem and stone the cherries; add a few broken kernels and enough sugar to keep them from discoloring. Let stand half an hour; remove the kernels; add more sugar and pour over any plain ice or ice cream. • •
The two-line method hides its own problem: the flavour this sauce is built on comes from broken cherry kernels, which is exactly the part that cannot be recommended.
- The kernels are the hazardCherry stones contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside. When the kernel is broken and left in contact with moisture, the seed's own enzymes convert it to hydrogen cyanide. Crushing and steeping is the one handling method that maximises that release.
- Nothing here is heatedCooking and long boiling drive off some of the hydrogen cyanide formed in a fruit preparation. This is a cold macerated sauce that goes straight onto ice cream, so nothing that leaches out of the kernels is driven off before serving.
- "A few broken kernels" is not a quantityThe dose depends entirely on how many stones, how finely broken, and how long they sit, none of which the recipe pins down. Removing the kernels after half an hour does not remove what has already dissolved into the syrup.
- Almond flavour was the pointThe kernel was standing in for bitter almond or noyau, a flavour note these older recipes reached for readily. Almond extract supplies a similar flavour without the seed.
- What the sugar was doingThe first addition of sugar draws juice and limits browning by slowing oxidation at the cut surfaces of the fruit; the second sweetens the finished syrup. That part of the technique is sound and unremarkable.
- If you want cherry sauce for icesUse a current recipe. Stemmed, stoned cherries with sugar make a perfectly good sauce with no kernels in it at all.
Sauces for ices occupy their own small territory in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, where a domestic ice cream freezer had become common enough that the plain vanilla or lemon ice was assumed and the interest moved to what went over it. The broken cherry kernel here is a survival of a much older European practice: cooks used the stones of cherries, peaches and apricots, along with bitter almonds, as a cheap source of the almond note found in ratafia and noyau liqueurs, and recipes for cherry preserves and brandies routinely told the cook to crack a handful of stones into the pot. The chemistry behind amygdalin and hydrogen cyanide was described in the nineteenth century, but the knowledge reached household manuals slowly and unevenly, and directions like this one persisted in print for decades afterward.