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Curacao Sauce
Sauce au Curacao.
Curacao is a cordial made by steeping orange peel in proof spirit and then adding to the flavored spirit three times as much simple syrup. It is brandy colored. As a substitute make the clear syrup sauce, the first of this series with a few cloves and some orange peel grated in it. Boil, strain and add half pint or less of good brandy.
This is less a recipe than a working note: a definition of the cordial followed by a syrup-and-brandy stand-in for it. The measurements assume you already have the book's clear syrup sauce in hand.
- The missing base"The clear syrup sauce, the first of this series" is a plain boiled sugar syrup, but its proportions are not given on this page. If you are working from this page alone you will have to fix a sugar-to-water ratio and a quantity yourself.
- Proof spiritIn 19th-century usage "proof spirit" means roughly 50 percent alcohol by volume, not the 80-90 percent of a modern neutral spirit. The reference matters only for understanding the cordial being imitated; the substitute uses brandy.
- Half a pint of brandyThat is a full cup, and in a sauce of this size it is aggressive. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons, taste, and build. The original's "or less" is doing real work.
- Add the brandy off the heatThe syrup is boiled and strained first, then the brandy goes in. If you boil after adding it you lose both the alcohol and most of the aroma that the sauce exists to deliver.
- Orange peel, not pithGrate only the coloured zest. The white layer beneath turns the syrup bitter in a flat, papery way that reads as nothing like curaçao. Two oranges' worth of zest is ample.
- Cloves"A few" means three or four whole cloves for a couple of cups of syrup. Clove overwhelms citrus quickly and cannot be taken back out once it has infused.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends entirely on how much syrup you start with, which the page does not state. It is a dessert sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, sponge cakes, souffl oom or or at room temperature.
Curaçao takes its name from the Caribbean island, where sweet oranges brought by Spanish settlers degenerated into the hard, intensely aromatic bitter laraha; its dried peel became the flavouring for the Dutch cordials that carried the island's name from the early 19th century onward. The entry's structure, a short definition followed by "as a substitute," suggests a book written for working pastry cooks rather than households: the author appears to assume the reader knows the syrup sauce by heart and needs only the variation.