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Kirsch Sauce
Pour into a saucepan one pint of cold water and one-half pound of granulated sugar, and place it over a hot fire. Mix one ounce of corn starch in a cup with one gill of cold water, and when the water in the saucepan is boiling, add the corn starch to it, stirring it well for two minutes with a whisk. Remove from the fire and add immediately one-half gill of kirsch and stir again for a minute. Strain through a fine sieve into a sauceboat, and serve very hot.
A clear, glossy cornstarch dessert sauce, spiked with cherry brandy off the heat. It comes together in under ten minutes, and nearly everything that can go wrong is a matter of timing.
- The hinge: add the kirsch off the fireThe alcohol carries most of the aroma, and it flashes off in seconds at a boil. Oscar's "remove from the fire and add immediately" is the whole point of the sauce, not a formality.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup. So the cornstarch is slaked in 1/2 cup cold water, and the kirsch measures 1/2 gill, or 2 fl oz — about 1/4 cup.
- Weights to volumesHalf a pound of granulated sugar is a generous cup (about 1 1/8 cups). One ounce of cornstarch is roughly 1/4 cup, or 3 1/2 to 4 tablespoons — spread across the pint of water plus the gill of slaking water and the half gill of kirsch, that gives a sauce that coats rather than pours thin.
- Two minutes of whisking is a minimum, not a maximumGive it the full two minutes -- Cornstarch needs to reach a boil and hold it briefly to lose its raw, chalky taste and reach full thickening power. Pull it early and the sauce tastes floury and slackens as it stands; drive it much past the two minutes and the starch begins to break down and thin instead.
- KirschKirschwasser is a dry, unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie, not a sweet cherry liqueur. Substituting maraschino or a cordial will make the sauce cloying, since the sugar is already carrying the sweetness.
- StrainingPassing it through a fine sieve catches any starch lumps and gives the clarity this sauce depends on for its look. Do it while the sauce is hot; as it cools it thickens and becomes much harder to pass through.
- Yield and serviceAround a pint and a half — enough for eight to ten servings. The recipe says only to send it out very hot in a sauceboat; a hot kirsch sauce of this kind would suit steamed or boiled puddings, poached fruit or a soufflé. It skins over as it cools, so hold it covered and whisk before serving.
Kirschwasser — literally "cherry water" — is a clear brandy distilled from whole small black cherries, pits included, and is generally traced to the Black Forest and the Rhine valley, where it remains a regional specialty. Its faint bitter-almond note comes from the crushed stones, which is why it flavors a sauce so strongly for so little volume. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's famously non-cooking maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 book largely from the hotel's working kitchen practice, and a sauce like this is exactly that: a house formula, held ready to be finished to order and sent out over whatever pudding the evening required. The clear starch-thickened dessert sauce was a fixture of grand-hotel cooking of the period, flavored to suit with rum, maraschino, vanilla or, as here, kirsch — cheap to hold, quick to finish, and unfailingly dramatic when poured hot at the table.