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Sauterne Sauce
1 cup sugar ½ cup water 4 tablespoons Sauterne Green coloring Make same as Claret Sauce, and color with leaf green.
A cold sugar-syrup sauce for ice creams and molded ices, built on the same pattern as the Claret Sauce printed alongside it. The whole thing is three ingredients and a thermometer's worth of judgment.
- The Claret Sauce methodThe cross-reference is to a recipe not printed on this page, but sauces of this type are made by boiling the sugar and water to a light syrup, cooling it, and then stirring in the wine. Adding wine to hot syrup would drive off much of the alcohol and aroma.
- What Sauterne means hereModern bottles read Sauternes, the sweet botrytised white of Bordeaux, but American labelling of the period often applied "Sauterne" loosely to sweetish white wine generally, so another semi-sweet white would not be out of keeping.
- Green coloring"leaf green" was a prepared green food coloring of the kind sold for tinting sweets, here signalling pistachio or mint. A drop or two of modern color does the same work; the sauce is naturally pale, so go carefully.
- ConsistencyA light syrup of this kind thickens as it cools but should stay pourable. If it sets too stiff when chilled, thin it with a spoonful of water rather than more wine.
- Yield and servingSomething under two cups, depending on how far the syrup reduces; serve it cold over vanilla ice cream, a frozen pudding or a fruit ice.
- AlcoholIf the wine is stirred into cooled syrup it is not cooked off, but the whole recipe contains only 4 tablespoons of wine, so a portion carries roughly half a tablespoon or less.
Wine-based dessert sauces of this kind belong to the late nineteenth-century American habit of dressing plain frozen creams for company, and Fannie Farmer's ices chapter pairs this one with a Claret Sauce, each a variation on the same cooled sugar syrup, so that a hostess could match the sauce to the color of the dish. The green coloring is the giveaway that this was for looks as much as flavor: tinted sauces, pistachio-green and rose-pink, are often said to have been a trick of the period's table, when a molded ice arrived at the table as a set piece. The instruction to color a white-wine sauce green rather than leave it pale says a good deal about how much of the dessert course was visual arrangement.