Cider Sauce
Mix two table-spoons butter with an even table-spoon of flour; stir in half a pint of brown sugar, and half a gill of boiled cider; add a gill of boiling water, mix well, let it simmer a few moments; serve hot.
A quick roux-thickened dessert sauce built on boiled cider, the one ingredient here that no longer sits in most pantries. Measurements are by volume in the old style, which makes the sugar quantity larger than it first looks.
- Boiled cider is the pointThis is sweet cider reduced heavily, by something on the order of six or eight to one, until it is a dark, tart syrup, not hard cider and not vinegar. It is still made commercially in New England; failing that, reduce a quart of unfiltered apple cider down to about half a cup and cool it. Little else gives the same acidity against the sugar.
- Half a pint of brown sugarA cup, measured by volume rather than weight, so pack it lightly rather than firmly. That is a considerable amount of sugar against three-quarters of a cup of total liquid, which is why the finished sauce is closer to a syrup than a gravy.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of boiled cider is a quarter cup, and a gill of boiling water is half a cup.
- The butter and flourTwo tablespoons of butter to one of flour is a slack roux; cook it a minute over low heat so the flour loses its raw taste, but do not let it colour. The sugar goes in off the direct heat or it will catch.
- Add liquid hotThe recipe specifies boiling water for a reason: cold liquid into a sugared roux sets it in lumps. Add the cider and water gradually, whisking, and the sauce comes together smooth.
- "Simmer a few moments"Two or three minutes, no more, once it is smooth and glossy. Simmered much longer the sugar concentrates further and the sauce stiffens as it cools.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a quarter by rough reckoning, enough for six to eight servings. The recipe names no accompaniment; sauces of this kind were generally sent up with steamed and baked puddings, cottage pudding, apple dumplings and boiled batter puddings, and it should go to the table genuinely hot.
Boiled cider was farm economics before it was a flavouring: pressed sweet cider cooked down in an open kettle until it kept without fermenting, giving a household a concentrated apple sweetener that lasted through winter and could be thinned back for drinking, mincemeat, pies and sauces. It was associated above all with New England and the apple-growing districts of the Ohio Valley. "The Dixie Cook Book" is one of the regional reissues generally traced to the Buckeye Cookery family of Midwestern community cookbooks, and the sauce sections of those volumes are full of these thin, sweet, flour-bound pudding sauces.