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Marmalade Sauce
Put one breakfast cupful of marmalade into a small saucepan with two wineglassfuls of white wine, and stir over a gentle fire until hot. Strain the sauce and it is then ready for serving. Brandy and water in equal parts may be substituted for the wine if preferred.
A two-ingredient dessert sauce that depends entirely on the marmalade you start with. The measurements are period terms rather than anything mysterious.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup; it is usually reckoned at 8 to 10 fl oz, so take it as about one standard cup, on the order of 10-11 oz by weight of marmalade.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in American cookbooks of this era is 2 fl oz. Two of them is 1/4 cup plus 1/4 cup, that is 1/2 cup of wine in all.
- Gentle fireLow heat, and only until the marmalade has loosened and the mixture is hot through. Boiling drives off the wine and can scorch the sugar at the pan bottom, which turns the sauce bitter.
- StrainingThe point of the strainer is to remove the peel, leaving a clear, glossy sauce. If you want the peel, choose a fine-cut marmalade and skip the straining; the sauce will be cloudier but no worse for it.
- Choose the marmaladeA bitter Seville orange marmalade gives the sauce its edge and keeps it from being merely sweet. Modern sweet breakfast marmalades make a much flatter sauce; a squeeze of lemon compensates.
- Wine and alcoholUse a dry or off-dry white. The brandy-and-water substitution gives a stronger, sharper sauce. Neither version is heated long enough for the alcohol to cook away, which matters if you are serving children.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup and a quarter once the peel is strained out, depending on the marmalade; serve warm over steamed or boiled puddings, sponge cake, or a plain souffle. It thickens as it cools and can be reheated gently.
Marmalade sauce belongs to the long line of hot sweet sauces that accompanied steamed and boiled puddings, the dessert backbone of nineteenth-century Anglo-American dining. It is essentially a preserve let down with liquid, and sauces of this kind appear in Oscar Tschirky's book alongside far more laborious productions. The word marmalade comes through French and Portuguese from marmelo, quince, the fruit originally preserved that way; the later shift to citrus, and specifically to bitter Seville oranges, is often credited to Scottish practice, though orange marmalade recipes are recorded in England well before that and the Dundee origin story is largely folk tradition. The alternative of brandy and water in equal parts is a reminder that spirits were a routine flavouring in the period's dessert sauces rather than an indulgence.