Raisin Sauce
For macaroni puddings and timbales make a sauce like the preceding and stew 1/2 pound raisins in it. Use the raisins as a garnish with the sauce. And then the transparent sauce goes still further.
A two-line variation that depends entirely on the recipe printed above it, which is a clear sugar-and-starch sauce rather than a cream sauce. Read it as an instruction to stretch one batch of sauce into a second dessert.
- "The preceding" sauceThe text itself calls it a transparent sauce, i.e. a clear one rather than a dairy sauce; the preceding recipe is not reproduced here, so its exact thickener and flavourings are unknown.
- Half a pound of raisinsAbout 1 1/2 cups. Raisins of this period were often sold with the seeds in, so hand-seeding may have been expected; modern seedless raisins go straight in.
- How long to stewSimmer the raisins in the sauce only until they plump and turn glossy, roughly 8 to 12 minutes over low heat. Longer and they collapse into the sauce, which defeats the purpose of using them as a garnish.
- Watch the starchA starch-thickened syrup thins if held at a hard boil or stirred aggressively once set. Keep it at a bare simmer while the fruit swells, and add a splash of water if it tightens as the raisins absorb liquid.
- TimbalesHere a timbale is a sweet pudding baked or steamed in a small straight-sided mould and turned out, not the savoury pastry case. Macaroni puddings were made from cooked macaroni set in sweetened custard.
- The point of the note"Goes still further" is the operative phrase. This is a hotel economy, one syrup base yielding a plain sauce, a fruited sauce and a garnish, so budget one batch across several plates.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to a run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for men working the pastry bench in hotels and restaurants, where the arithmetic of stretching a single preparation across a long menu mattered as much as flavour. That explains the shape of this entry: not a standalone recipe but an appendix to the transparent sauce above it, showing how one syrup can be turned out three ways. Macaroni puddings, now largely forgotten, were a staple of that era's dessert lists, boiled pasta bound in sweet custard with spice and dried fruit, and the pairing of dried fruit with clear starch-thickened syrups was standard practice at a time when raisins were among the cheapest and most reliably available sweet fruits in a commercial larder, arriving in boxes from Malaga, Smyrna and, increasingly by the 1890s, California.