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Sauce of Mixed Fruit
One or two kinds of stewed fruits added to a tart stewed plum sauce will improve it and give variety.
Rub the sauce through a strainer, add to it two or three Bartlett pears (cut fine and stewed until tender in a very little water), and a few tablespoonfuls of left-over apple sauce. Sweeten and cook together until the flavors of the fruits are well blended and the sauce has thickened slightly.
Fruit Sago (from Syrup Left from Canning) In canning berries there is often a quantity of fruit syrup left over. Take a pint of any kind at hand, but raspberry or raspberry and currant particularly recommended, and stir into it when boiling three tablespoonfuls of sago that has been soaked in cold water several hours. Add more sugar if necessary and a little salt, and cook in a double boiler until the sago is soft. Pour in a mold and chill. This can be served with a little fresh fruit or with sweetened cream.
Two thrift preparations run together: a blended fruit sauce and a molded sago pudding made from canning syrup. Both are vague by modern standards, and both depend on a base ingredient you may have to build rather than find in the refrigerator.
- The plum base"Tart stewed plum sauce" means whole plums simmered with a little water and minimal sugar until collapsing, then sieved. Italian prune plums or damsons give the acidity the recipe is relying on; supermarket dessert plums will need lemon juice.
- Proportions and yieldThe recipe gives no quantity for the plum base at all; only the two or three pears and "a few tablespoonfuls" of apple sauce are specified, so yield depends entirely on how much plum sauce you start with. Nothing here is critical, so taste as you go.
- Bartlett pearsBartlett is the American name for the Williams pear. Cut fine and stewed, they should be tender in 10 to 15 minutes; they break down quickly and are what gives the mixed sauce its body.
- SagoSago is starch from the sago palm, sold as small hard pearls and still available in Asian and South Asian groceries. Small pearl tapioca substitutes measure for measure; instant or minute tapioca does not, as it needs no soaking and will turn the syrup to paste.
- The soak mattersSeveral hours in cold water hydrates the pearls all the way through. Skip it and the centers stay chalky no matter how long the pudding cooks.
- Double boiler timingThe original gives no time. Expect 30 to 45 minutes over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the pearls are translucent with no white dot at the center. A double boiler is specified, presumably because direct heat risks scorching the sugary syrup.
- Canning syrup strengthLeftover syrup from home canning varies enormously in sweetness. Taste before adding more sugar; a pint of heavy syrup may need none, and the pinch of salt is there to keep the whole thing from tasting flat.
- Setting and servingA pint of syrup to three tablespoons of sago is likely to set softly rather than firmly. Chill at least four hours in a rinsed mold, and serve with fresh berries or sweetened cream as directed; do not expect it to turn out as cleanly as a gelatin.
Both of these belong to a genre of American household writing that treated waste as a moral as much as a financial failing, and which flourished in the decades on either side of the First World War, when domestic-science instructors and food-conservation campaigns pressed the same argument. The two preparations here also mark the seasonal rhythm of a house that put up its own fruit: the mixed sauce disposes of odd dishes of stewed plums, pears and applesauce standing in the cool pantry, while the sago pudding uses the sweet syrup drained from berries at canning time, when a full jar's worth might otherwise go down the drain. Sago itself was a Victorian and Edwardian staple, imported from Southeast Asia and long associated with nursery food and invalid cookery, which is part of why it turns up in a book concerned with cheap, mild, easily made dishes. The Bartlett pear takes its American name from Enoch Bartlett, a Massachusetts merchant generally credited with popularizing the variety in the early nineteenth century; in Europe it is still called the Williams.