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Wine Sauce
3/4 Pint Water 11/2 Cups Sugar 1/2 Cups Corn Syrup 1 Small Teaspoon Cornstarch 1 Teaspoon Extract Lemon and Cinnamon 1/2 Gill Wine Boil water, add cornstarch, dissolved, and the sugar; boil 15 minutes, strain; when about to serve, add extracts and wine.
A clear, sweet dessert sauce of the sort ladled over steamed and boiled puddings. The proportions are workable, but the units and one typographical slip need sorting out first.
- The measurements3/4 pint is 1 1/2 cups. A gill is half a cup, so 1/2 gill of wine is 1/4 cup. "1/2 Cups Corn Syrup" is almost certainly 1/2 cup, though the plural leaves it genuinely ambiguous.
- Dissolve the starch coldA small teaspoon of cornstarch in 1 1/2 cups of water gives a light glaze, not a thickened sauce. Slurry it in a spoonful of cold water before it goes near the pan or it will seize into lumps that no straining will fully rescue.
- Where the corn syrup goesThe instructions list it but never add it. Put it in with the sugar; it is there to keep the sauce from crystallizing as it cools, which is exactly what a heavily reduced sugar syrup will otherwise do.
- Fifteen minutes is a real reductionBoiling that volume hard for a quarter hour drives off a good deal of the water and leaves a syrup that sets thick and sticky when cold. Watch it rather than the clock, and pull it when it coats a spoon; it should be pourable at serving temperature.
- Cinnamon extractStill sold, but no longer a pantry staple. A 2-inch cinnamon stick simmered in the syrup and lifted out at straining does the same work.
- The wine goes in off the heatAdding it at the end, as directed, is the point of the recipe -- the alcohol and the aromatics survive. A fortified wine such as sherry, madeira or a sweet port is the likeliest intention for a pudding sauce of this kind. The sauce is not reboiled, so it stays alcoholic; worth knowing if children are at the table.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 cups after reduction, enough to sauce a family-sized steamed pudding.
Sweet wine sauces were the standard finish for the boiled and steamed puddings that anchored Anglo-American dessert courses through the nineteenth century. What dates this particular version is the corn syrup: commercial glucose syrup reached American household shelves in quantity around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period fold it into candy and sauce recipes precisely because it prevents the graininess that plagued all-sugar syrups. The bottled lemon and cinnamon extracts point the same direction -- a household buying flavor in small bottles rather than grating and grinding. The wine itself is the older part of the recipe, and the instruction to add it only at the last moment reflects long-standing kitchen practice: heat takes the perfume out of fortified wine, so the cook holds it back until the sauce boat is on its way to the table.