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Sauce Millefleurs
1 pound of sugar. 2 ounces of corn starch. 1 pint of water. 1 pint of thick sweet cream. 1/2 cup of red fruit syrup. Various flavorings. The making of this sauce will be best understood by the explanation that it is a pearly cream sauce with a mixture of several agreable flavors. It should be pearl pink. Of old, when the spices, almonds, lemon zest, and flavors of nectarine and peach had to be prepared separately this sauce became a serious affair. Now, by boiling cinnamon, coves and grated peel in the pint of water, stirring in the sugar and starch, then the cream, and judiciously adding drops of various extracts the sauce can be made as good as need be in a few minutes. It must be strained, of course.
A starch-thickened cream sauce for puddings, ices and plain cake, flavored by infusion and then by extracts. The whole thing is a matter of restraint: the spice infusion and the drops of flavoring are meant to blur together, not to identify themselves.
- Cook the starch outTwo ounces of cornstarch is roughly 7 tablespoons, enough for a pourable sauce from a pint of water plus a pint of cream. Slake it in a little cold water, add it to the boiling spiced water, and let it bubble a full minute or two before the cream goes in, or the sauce will taste chalky no matter how well it is flavored.
- "Thick sweet cream"Sweet here means not soured, not sugared. Use heavy cream. Add it off the boil and bring the sauce back only to a bare simmer; hard boiling after the cream is in risks curdling against a pound of sugar.
- SugarA pound is about 2 1/4 cups, which by modern taste is a great deal for a quart of sauce. Reducing it by a third still gives a workable sauce and lets the spice and fruit read more clearly.
- "Coves" is clovesA printer's slip. A short stick of cinnamon and three or four cloves in the pint of water is plenty; more and the sauce turns medicinal. Simmer them with the grated lemon or orange peel ten minutes, covered, before straining.
- Red fruit syrupThe period bottled raspberry, currant or cherry syrup for soda fountains and sauces. Any thick unseeded fruit syrup works; it is here for the "pearl pink" as much as the flavor, so add it a spoonful at a time and stop at pale rose.
- The extractsDrops, literally. Peach and nectarine flavor in this era came from almond-type notes, so a very little almond extract plus vanilla and a trace of lemon reproduces the intended effect. Add them once the sauce is off the heat, since alcohol-based extracts flash off in a hot pan.
- Strain and coolStrain while hot through a fine sieve to catch spice, peel and any starch lumps, then press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface to stop a skin forming. It thickens noticeably as it cools; thin with cream, not water.
- YieldSomething over a quart, closer to a quart and a half once the dissolved sugar and syrup are counted, enough for 12 to 16 servings over steamed pudding, charlotte, poached fruit or ice cream. Keeps three or four days refrigerated.
Millefleurs — "thousand flowers" — named a blend so compounded that no single element stood out; the same word attaches to liqueurs, honeys and porcelain patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The recipe's own aside is the interesting part: it describes a real change in professional pastry work, from a kitchen that distilled and pounded its own flavorings — ratafias, almond milks, spice waters, each prepared separately over days — to one supplied by the bottle. American commercial extracts and fruit syrups were cheap and widely sold by the last quarter of the 1800s, and books written for hotel and restaurant pastry departments treat them not as a compromise but as the obvious labor saving they were. What survives here is an older flavor idea, the deliberately unplaceable perfumed cream, executed by shortcut in a few minutes.