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Raisin Sauce
1½ cups water cup raisins ساط 1 teaspoonful flour Sprinkling of salt cup brown or white Nutmeg sugar 1 teaspoonful butter Boil raisins in water for fifteen minutes, add sugar, boil fifteen minutes longer. Thicken with the flour blended with small amount of water.
Add salt and spice, and just before taking up, the butter. Stir well and serve.
Cream Puffs (from Pop-overs) Take any pop-overs left from breakfast and make an opening in them just large enough to neatly fill the center. For four to six pop-overs make a filling of one-half cup of cream sweetened with two tablespoonfuls of sugar and flavored with one-quarter teaspoonful of vanilla or a little lemon-juice. Add a very little salt and whip it.
Stir in one teaspoonful of melted gelatine. Set on the ice to chill.. When ready to serve stir in half a cup of any fresh fruit that has been sugared, then drain off the juice, and fill the pop-overs.
Serve at once. The fruit may be omitted.
A boiled raisin sauce of the plain sort meant to be poured over bread pudding, steamed pudding or toast. The quantities in the ingredient column have not survived intact, so treat the proportions below as a working guide rather than a transcription.
- ProportionsThe measures for raisins, sugar and water are ambiguous as printed; the fractions have dropped out. A sauce of this type is conventionally built on about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup raisins, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon flour and 1 teaspoon butter.
- The half-hour boilThirty minutes of boiling is not overcooking here: it plumps the raisins fully and reduces the water to a syrup. Keep it at a bare simmer in a small heavy saucepan and top up with a splash of water if it threatens to go dry before the sugar stage.
- ThickeningOne teaspoon of flour in a cup of liquid gives a barely-there body, not a gravy. Slake it in a tablespoon of cold water, stir it in, and let the sauce boil a full minute or it will taste of raw flour.
- Butter lastThe recipe adds the butter 'just before taking up', i.e. at the very end, after thickening. Stirred in at that point it enriches and glosses the sauce rather than being boiled away in it.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and add with the salt at the end. Pre-ground nutmeg boiled in the syrup loses most of its aroma.
- Brown or white sugarBrown sugar gives a molasses depth that suits bread pudding; white sugar keeps the sauce clear and lets the raisins carry the flavour.
- ServingServe warm. It thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water without harm.
Left-over cookery books of the early twentieth century treat sweet sauces as the workhorse that redeems stale bread: a slice of dry loaf becomes bread pudding, brown betty or a simple steamed pudding, and a boiled raisin sauce carries all of them. The technique is older than the book, essentially a thin fruit syrup thickened with a scrap of flour and finished with butter, the same family as the raisin sauces still poured over baked ham. Raisins earned their place in the household store cupboard because they kept indefinitely and supplied both sweetness and fruit flavour out of season, at a time when a jar of them was one of the few reliable ways to dress up plain starch.