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Pineapple or Raspberry Sauce for Puddings
2 pounds of sugar. 1/2 pint of pineapple juice or syrup made by steeping the slices, or of liquor from the cans. 1/2 pound of pineapple in shreds 1/2 pint of port or claret wine Dissolve the sugar in the pineapple juice. Bring to a boil, strain, then add the wine and pineapple, keep hot without boiling.
Instead of the wine half a pint of water and a few drops of red coloring--to make the sauce pink only--can be used.
Red raspberries can be used in the place of pineapple with the difference that the berries should be dropped singly into the boiling syrup while it is still thick and never be stirred. In this way they retain their proper shape while coloring and flavoring the syrup. No wine needed.
Very handsome sauces of other kinds of fruit are made in the way above indicated, by adding it to a strong syrup made with half fruit juice and half water. White sweet grapes which furnish no syrup may be used to advantage thrown whole into boiling wine sauce.
A hotel-scale sweet syrup sauce built on a fixed ratio: two parts sugar to one part fruit juice by weight and volume. Everything else in the recipe is a variation on that base.
- The measuresHalf a pint is one cup; two pounds of sugar is about 4 1/2 cups granulated. With the wine and fruit added the finished sauce comes to rather more than a quart: a large batch by household standards.
- "Liquor from the cans"Simply the packing syrup or juice from canned pineapple. Modern pineapple canned in juice gives a thinner, less sweet liquid than the heavy syrup of the 1890s, so the sauce will be looser and sharper — no harm, but expect it.
- Steeping for syrupIf you use fresh pineapple, the instruction to steep the slices means covering them in hot water or light syrup and letting them stand off the heat until the liquid takes up the flavour, then straining.
- ClaretRed Bordeaux, or any dry red wine of that character. Port makes a heavier, sweeter sauce; given two pounds of sugar already in play, the dry red is the better balance.
- Hot without boilingThe hinge of the recipe. Once the wine goes in, boiling drives off the alcohol and the volatile aromatics that are the whole point of adding it. Hold the pan at a bare steam, well under a simmer.
- Dropping the raspberriesAdd them one at a time into thick boiling syrup and do not stir. Stirring shears the drupelets apart and turns the sauce into a cloudy pink mush; left alone, the berries hold their shape and bleed colour slowly.
- Red colouringThe wineless version relies on dye for its pink. Raspberry or cranberry juice will colour it instead, with flavour attached, though it takes considerably more than a few drops.
- Keeping itAt this sugar concentration the strained base keeps a week or more refrigerated. Add wine and fruit only to the portion you are serving, since both fade on standing.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals aimed at hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the quantities start at two pounds of sugar and why the author bothers to explain the underlying formula — half fruit juice, half water, boiled to a strong syrup — instead of just one sauce. Pudding sauces were, by most accounts, a common fixture on American hotel menus of the period, where a boiled or steamed pudding often closed the meal and the sauce was said to be what distinguished one day's dessert from the next. That pineapple appears alongside raspberries as an everyday option is generally connected to the spread of commercial canning: by the 1890s canned pineapple, much of it packed in the Caribbean and Baltimore before Hawaii came to dominate, was widely available, and a pastry cook could plausibly count on the syrup in the tin as a working ingredient. The final note about white grapes thrown whole into boiling wine sauce is the mark of the trade writer, handing over the principle and trusting the cook to apply it.