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Fruit Sauce
1/4 Cup Sugar 1/4 Cup Corn Syrup Cup Fruit Juice Cup Boiling Water 1 Tablespoon Cornstarch 1/2 Tablespoon Butter Substitute Teaspoon Salt 2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice 1/4 Grated Rind of Lemon Teaspoon Cinnamon 1/8 Teaspoon Ginger Mix sugar, salt and cornstarch. Add water gradually, stirring constantly. Add corn syrup, and boil for a few minutes.
Remove from fire, add butter substitute, spice, lemon juice, and grated rind. Any fruit juice or a mixture of fruit juices from canned fruit may be used. (Makes 17/4 cups-about 6 servings.)
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce built on the syrup drained from canned fruit. The printed ingredient list has lost several of its fractions, so read it as a set of proportions rather than exact amounts.
- The missing fractions"Cup Fruit Juice," "Cup Boiling Water," "Teaspoon Salt" and "Teaspoon Cinnamon" all had fractions in the original setting that have dropped out, and there is no way to recover them with certainty. Working back from the stated yield, the juice and water together come to rather over a cup, and the salt and spice are fractions of a teaspoon. One tablespoon of cornstarch will set about that much liquid to a pouring consistency; if you scale the liquid up or down, scale the starch with it. The instruction to boil a few minutes is the hinge: cornstarch tastes raw and chalky until the mixture comes to a full boil and turns from cloudy to glossy, and a bare simmer is not enough.
- Add the juice off the heatAdd the lemon juice off the heat -- The directions cook the starch in water and corn syrup and add the lemon juice and rind only after the pan leaves the fire; where the fruit juice itself belongs is never stated. Keeping acid out of a long boil is sensible in any case, as prolonged boiling with acid breaks down cornstarch and the sauce thins again.
- Butter substituteThis means margarine or oleo. Ordinary butter works identically at half a tablespoon.
- Corn syrupLight corn syrup, standing in for part of the sugar. It also keeps the sauce from crystallizing or going grainy as it cools.
- Fruit juiceCanned fruit syrup, from peaches, pears, cherries or pineapple, is the obvious source and the one the recipe names, though it allows any fruit juice or a mixture. An unsweetened juice will need a little more sugar to compensate.
- YieldThe printed "17/4 cups" is a garbled fraction, most likely 1 3/4 cups, which would suit the six servings given. Serve warm over steamed or baked puddings, cottage pudding or plain cake.
Sauces like this belong to the era of home canning, when every jar of peaches or cherries left behind a quantity of sweet syrup that a thrifty cook was not going to pour down the drain. The corn syrup and the "butter substitute" may or may not point to a kitchen working under sugar and butter conservation, but that kind of substitution was certainly urged on American households during the First World War and again in the 1940s, and repeated in cookbooks long after the shortages ended. The technique itself is older still: a starch-bound sweet sauce, spiced with cinnamon and ginger and sharpened with lemon, is the standard nineteenth-century accompaniment to steamed and boiled puddings, which are dense and need something bright poured over them.