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Sherry Sauce
2 heaping cups of sugar. 1 tablespoon cornstarch mixed with sugar. 1 pint boiling water. 1/2 cup sherry. 1 tablespoon butter. Cook until smooth and thick. Serve hot. Use claret if preferred.
A plain sweet dessert sauce of the boiled-syrup type, thickened with a token spoonful of cornstarch. Two points decide whether it works: the starch must be dry-mixed into the sugar before any liquid touches it, and the sherry goes in off the heat.
- Mix the starch into the sugar firstThe instruction "cornstarch mixed with sugar" is the hinge of the recipe. The sugar granules keep the starch from clumping when the boiling water hits, so no lumps and no straining. Whisk them together thoroughly in the dry pan before adding water.
- Sugar quantityTwo heaping cups is roughly 16 oz / 450 g. Against a pint of water this is a heavy syrup, sweet by modern taste; a level two cups gives a sauce that still coats a spoon.
- One tablespoon of starch is deliberateThis is a pouring sauce, not a pudding. Some of the body comes from the sugar syrup itself rather than the starch. The recipe gives no time, only "cook until smooth and thick."
- Add the sherry lastThe recipe does not say when the sherry and butter go in. Stirring them in after the pan comes off the heat keeps the wine flavour from cooking away.
- What sherry to useA medium or cream sherry suits this; dry fino disappears against that much sugar. Avoid bottles sold as "cooking sherry," which are salted.
- ClaretClaret in this period means red Bordeaux, or any dry red standing in for it. Used instead of sherry it gives a thinner, sharper, wine-red sauce, better on a plain steamed pudding than on ice cream.
- Yield and servingRoughly three to four cups, for a dessert-sauce portion over cottage pudding, steamed pudding, gingerbread or baked apples. It thickens further as it cools; thin with a little hot water if it stiffens too much.
Hot sweet sauces spiked with wine or spirits were a standard accompaniment to the steamed and boiled puddings common on American dessert tables into the 1920s, and general cookbooks of the period commonly carry a rank of them: hard sauce, foamy sauce, lemon sauce, sherry or wine sauce. The bare-bones construction here -- water rather than milk or cream, a single tablespoon of butter, and starch doing the work that egg yolks would do in a richer kitchen -- fits the wartime and post-war emphasis on household economy and on conserving sugar. The casual "use claret if preferred" is worth noting for its date, since national Prohibition took effect in January 1920 and later cookbooks often dropped wine from their sauces or substituted flavouring extracts.