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Cherry Sauce
Take two or three handfuls of sour cherries, remove the stones and stems, pound them in a mortar, with their kernels, and put them in a stewpan. Then add a lump of sugar, a glass of claret, a bit of lemon zest and cinnamon, and boil until the cherries are nicely done; then strain them through a sieve, return them to the pan, and thicken with one tablespoonful of corn starch mixed with a little cold water. Boil it up again, and add six tablespoonfuls of preserved cherries, previously dipped in warm water.
The body of this sauce is straightforward nineteenth-century hotel cookery, but one instruction puts it outside what we can recommend: the cherry stones are cracked and pounded with the fruit.
- The kernels are the problemCherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the seed is crushed and wetted. Pounding the stones in a mortar is precisely the action that liberates it, and here the crushed kernels are then simmered in the sauce. It is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds unsafe to eat in quantity.
- Boiling and straining are not controlsBoiling and straining are not reliable controls -- straining removes the solids but not what has already dissolved into the liquid, and although hydrogen cyanide is volatile and some will be driven off during cooking, the recipe gives no temperature, no time held, and no way to judge how much was extracted or how much remains. There is no measured basis on which to call this step safe.
- No quantity is fixed anywhere"Two or three handfuls" of cherries means an unknown number of stones, so the dose of amygdalin is unknowable by design. Recipes of this era assumed a cook's hand and a cook's judgment; that is fine for sugar and unacceptable for a cyanogenic seed.
- What the kernels were forThey supply benzaldehyde, the almond-marzipan note that traditionally rounds out sour cherries. Modern kitchens get the same effect from a splash of kirsch or a little almond extract, both of which are made under controlled conditions.
- Reading the rest of the text'a glass of claret' is not a fixed measure; in period usage a wineglassful is commonly reckoned at about two fluid ounces, a quarter of a cup, though a larger glass is possible. A 'lump of sugar' is a single loaf-sugar lump, on the order of a teaspoon, which is very little against sour fruit. 'Preserved cherries' are cherries in heavy syrup; the dip in warm water is presumably to rinse off the clinging syrup.
- If you want the sauceUse a current recipe for sour cherry sauce, one that works from pitted fruit alone. Do not adapt this one.
Sauces of stewed sour cherries thickened and cut with red wine belong to the Central European repertoire that came west with German and Austrian cooks, where cherry sauce is served with game, venison, ham and boiled beef as often as with dessert. Crushing the stones along with the fruit appears in that tradition and in French kitchens too, for the same reason a Black Forest cake gets kirsch: the kernel carries the almond aroma that reads as the essence of cherry, and the fruit's flesh alone tastes flatter. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume reads as a set of reminders to a professional -- no yields, no timings, a glass of claret and a lump of sugar.