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Claret Sauce
Boil one cup sugar with one-half gill of water. for eight minutes. Cool till you are able to taste it, then add two gills of claret. Serve cold.
A two-ingredient dessert syrup: cook sugar and water to a light syrup, then let it down with red wine. The only real skill is not boiling the wine.
- GillsA US gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup. Half a gill is 1/4 cup water; two gills is 1 cup of claret. Total yield is roughly 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings over pudding.
- ClaretAn English trade name for the red wines of Bordeaux, not a grape or a style of its own. Any dry, moderately tannic red works — Cabernet-Merlot blends, or a Cotes du Rhone. Avoid anything labelled "cooking wine," which is salted.
- The eight minutesOne cup sugar to 1/4 cup water boiled hard for eight minutes will carry the syrup to thread stage (from about 230F) or beyond. Watch it rather than the clock: at this ratio the water is nearly gone and the syrup can colour fast. Cover the pan for the first minute or two so steam washes crystals off the sides.
- Why it must cool first"Cool till you are able to taste it" is the hinge. Pouring wine into near-boiling syrup drives off the aromatics and can make the mixture sputter and seize; a syrup at or below hand temperature takes the wine smoothly and keeps the fruit.
- Uncooked alcoholThe wine is never heated, so the sauce is fully alcoholic — roughly two-thirds wine by volume. Not one for children's puddings; use fruit juice and a squeeze of lemon there instead, though the result is a different sauce.
- Consistency and storageIt thickens noticeably as it chills and will thin again at room temperature. Refrigerated in a jar it keeps a couple of weeks. If it sets too stiff, warm gently and add a spoonful of water.
- ServingThe recipe says only "Serve cold." Sauces of this kind were commonly sent to table with hot steamed or boiled puddings — plum pudding, cabinet pudding, a plain suet roll. Also good on poached pears or ice cream.
Wine sauces of this kind were standard equipment in Anglo-American dessert cookery through the nineteenth century, sitting alongside hard sauce and foamy sauce as the expected accompaniment to a boiled or steamed pudding. "Claret" is an English commercial term for red Bordeaux, in use for centuries; the Butterick book, published by the pattern company as part of its broad program of household instruction for middle-class readers, treats it as an ordinary pantry item rather than a luxury. The brevity of the recipe is itself suggestive: sugar syrup thinned with wine or spirits appears to have been a familiar enough formula to need little elaboration.