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Claret Sauce
¼ cup water 1/3 cup claret Boil sugar and water eight minutes; cool slightly, and add claret. 1 cup sugar 3 3/4 cup water
A two-ingredient dessert syrup for spooning over ices and sorbets. The measurements as printed here have been scrambled by transcription, so read them with care before you start.
- The water figuresThe printed page gives ¼ cup water and 1/3 cup claret, as our text now reads. The second water line, 3 3/4 cup water, still sits oddly beside the 1 cup sugar; read it as 3/4 cup water and treat the two water lines as one addition.
- What claret isIn American and British usage of the period, claret meant dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red with decent acidity works; avoid anything sweet or heavily oaked, which will fight the sugar syrup.
- The eight-minute boilBoiling 1 cup sugar with 3/4 cup water for eight minutes gives a light syrup. The recipe names no stage or temperature, and how far the syrup reduces depends on the pan and the heat; boiled much longer it will be noticeably thicker once chilled.
- Cool before adding the wineThe recipe says to cool slightly before the claret goes in. Adding wine to boiling syrup would drive off some of its aroma, so let the syrup lose its fiercest heat before stirring it in.
- Alcohol remainsNothing here cooks the wine off, so the finished sauce is mildly alcoholic. Worth knowing if it is going over ice cream for children.
- Yield and servingYield -- Roughly one to one and a quarter cups. The recipe gives no serving directions of any kind.
Wine sauces of this kind sit at the plain end of a long tradition of sweetened wine preparations, from medieval spiced hippocras down through the negus and mulled clarets of the nineteenth-century sideboard. What sets this one apart is the context: it is a short syrup of the sort meant to dress frozen desserts at a time when a household ice cream freezer and a reliable supply of ice had become ordinary in middle-class American kitchens. The recipe's brevity speaks for itself - exact cup measures, a timed boil, and no discussion at all of what the cook is meant to do with it.