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Fruit Sauce
Stew one breakfast cupful each of cherries, plums and green gages with a very little water and loaf sugar to taste; rub the fruit through a fine hair-sieve into another stewpan, crack the stones and pound the kernels and blend them with the fruit. Mix one teaspoonful of cornstarch with a little water, stir it in with the fruit and continue stirring over the fire until the sauce boils and thickens, add a wineglassful of port wine and the juice of half a lemon. This sauce may be served with puddings, pies, or blancmanges.
The fruit base is straightforward, but the instruction to crack the stones and pound the kernels into the sauce is the reason this one stays on the page rather than going into the pan.
- The kernels are the problemCherry, plum and greengage kernels contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and moistened — which is exactly what pounding and stirring into a wet sauce does. Cooking drives off some of it, but not predictably, and the kernels from three cupfuls of stone fruit amount to considerably more than the pinch a period recipe usually calls for.
- Why the period did it anywayKernels were used as a cheap source of the bitter-almond note that would otherwise cost you ratafia or noyau, and period recipes call for them freely, usually a few at a time. A current recipe using almond extract for that flavour is the sensible substitute.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fl oz, so a standard modern cup of each fruit or a little more.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in a hard cone or block, broken and crushed as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is its direct descendant.
- WineglassfulIn cookbooks of this era a wineglass is about 2 fl oz, not the 6 oz pour of a modern glass.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine sieve of the period and unreactive with acid fruit. A nylon or stainless conical strainer does the same job.
Oscar Tschirky's book collects the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen at the turn of the twentieth century, and this sauce belongs to the English pudding tradition that American hotel cookery drew on — a sieved stone-fruit purée, thickened with cornstarch, sharpened with lemon and fortified with port, to be poured over steamed puddings, pies and blancmange. Greengages, the green-gold plums generally traced to a variety brought to England in the eighteenth century and named for the Gage family, were still a common summer market fruit when this was written and appear far less often now. The kernel trick was familiar in Victorian and Edwardian cookery: noyau, ratafia biscuits and fruit compotes leaned on the bitter-almond flavour of crushed stone-fruit pits, a habit that commercial almond extract quietly and safely replaced.