Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Cinnamon Sauce
Cinnamon Sauce
Take a stick of cinnamon, break it into small pieces, and put into a pan with three ounces of sugar and a trifle over one pint of water; place this on the fire, and after it has boiled up once, skim and strain it into a basin. Mix a little arrowroot, or corn starch with some cold water, place it in the pan, and take out the cinnamon. Boil it once more and it is then ready for use.
A clear, lightly thickened pudding sauce of the kind that once accompanied steamed puddings, boiled rice and plain cake. The written order of operations is slightly garbled; the sense is straightforward once untangled.
- The hinge: how long you boil after thickeningArrowroot thickens at just below boiling and thins again if held at a boil, turning slack and slightly slimy. Bring the sauce back barely to a boil and take it off. Cornstarch is the opposite and needs a full minute of simmering to lose its raw taste.
- Reading the instructionsStrain the infusion into a basin, rinse the pan, return the liquid to it, then stir in the slurry. "Take out the cinnamon" is redundant after straining; the line may be a compositor's or author's slip, or a leftover from a version in which the stick was fished out rather than the syrup strained off.
- QuantitiesThree ounces of sugar is 85 g, about 6 to 7 tablespoons. "A trifle over one pint" means a little more than 16 fl oz, so a shade over 2 cups of water.
- How much starchThe original gives none. For a pouring sauce, allow about 2 teaspoons arrowroot or 1 tablespoon cornstarch per pint, slaked in two tablespoons of cold water. Double it for a sauce thick enough to coat.
- The cinnamon itselfOne stick means one quill, commonly about 3 inches. Most supermarket cinnamon is cassia, which is stronger and darker than Ceylon cinnamon; cassia was already common in the American spice trade by this date, so the sauce may well have tasted much as it would today. A single quill is plenty for a pint.
- SkimmingThe scum is impurities from the sugar and fine debris from the bark rather than anything harmful, but skimming it matters here because the point of an arrowroot sauce is clarity. Cornstarch will render it opaque in any case.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Serve warm over steamed or baked puddings, rice, or plain sponge. It sets on cooling and does not reheat well once thickened with arrowroot, so make it close to the meal.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, put his name to a 1896 volume that ran to more than nine hundred pages, and sauces like this one appear in it stripped to a few lines with no yield and no measured starch. Thin sweet sauces bound with arrowroot or cornstarch were a fixture of nineteenth-century pudding cookery, valued because they stayed translucent where a flour-and-butter sauce went cloudy, and arrowroot in particular carried a reputation as a light, easily digested thickener suited to invalid cookery. Cinnamon by the 1890s had long since ceased to be a luxury spice, and a sauce of sugar, water and a single quill of bark is a good illustration of how much of grand-hotel cooking rested on very plain foundations.