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Raspberry Sauce
Squeeze the juice from a sufficient quantity of ripe raspberries to make one-half pint, pour it in a small lined saucepan, adding the juice of a lemon, sweeten to taste with sugar, and place it over the fire until boiling. Put one tablespoonful of arrowroot in a basin, strain the juice and pour it into the basin with the arrowroot. Return the whole to the saucepan and stir it over the fire until thick and boiling again. The sauce is then ready for use. If the fresh raspberries cannot be had, one breakfast cupful of raspberry jam can be used with one-half pint of water. Use the lemon juice, but if sufficiently sweet, the sugar may be omitted.
A clear, glossy fruit sauce for puddings, ice cream and steamed sponges. It comes together in five minutes, and the only place it can go wrong is the thickener.
- Arrowroot is the hingeArrowroot thickens at just below boiling and then breaks down if held at a hard boil, turning the sauce thin and slightly slimy. Bring it back only to the first bubbles, then take it off the heat.
- Slake it firstThe original pours boiling juice onto dry arrowroot in a basin, which risks lumps. Mix the tablespoon of arrowroot to a smooth cream with a little cold water or cold juice before the hot liquid goes in.
- Half a pintOne US cup, 8 fl oz. That takes roughly 1 1/2 lb of raspberries pressed through a sieve, and yields about a cup of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings.
- Breakfast cupfulAn old breakfast cup ran larger than a teacup, around 8 to 10 fl oz. Measure a generous cup of jam, thin it with the half pint of water, and strain out the seeds.
- Lined saucepanIn period usage this generally meant a pan lined with tin or enamel rather than bare copper or iron, which discolour acidic fruit. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the job now; avoid unlined aluminium.
- Sugar and lemonSweeten before thickening, not after, so the sugar dissolves cleanly. The lemon juice is there for acidity as much as flavour, and should stay in even with sweet jam.
- If you substitute cornstarchYou may need a little more than the tablespoon of arrowroot, and expect a slightly cloudy sauce rather than the clear one arrowroot gives; cook it a minute longer to lose the raw starch taste.
- ServingServe warm over hot puddings, or cool it with a film of water or a butter paper on the surface to stop a skin forming. It sets a little firmer when cold.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and its dessert-sauce chapter is a fair picture of what a large American hotel kitchen kept ready on the range. Arrowroot, milled from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported chiefly from St. Vincent, was the fashionable thickener of the period precisely because it sets clear and tasteless, letting a fruit sauce keep its colour where flour would dull it; it also had a long reputation as an invalid food, which did it no harm on nineteenth-century menus. The fallback to jam and water is the practical half of the recipe. Raspberries have a short season and travel badly, and a hotel that needed raspberry sauce in February reached for the preserve pot.