Jelly Sauce
Melt one ounce of sugar and two table-spoons grape jelly over the fire in a half pint of boiling water, and stir into it half a tea-spoon corn starch dissolved in a half cup cold water, let come to a boil, and it will be ready for use. Any other fruit jelly may be used instead of grape.
A thin, pourable dessert sauce of the kind nineteenth-century kitchens ladled over steamed and boiled puddings. It comes together in under five minutes; the only real skill is in the starch.
- Measures in modern termsA half pint of boiling water is one cup, and an ounce of sugar is roughly two level tablespoons. With the half cup of cold water used to slake the starch, the finished sauce runs to about a cup and a half.
- The hinge: slake the starch coldThe cornstarch must be fully dispersed in the cold water before it meets the hot liquid, or it will seize into lumps that no amount of stirring will break up. Whisk it smooth, pour it into the pan in a thin stream, and keep stirring.
- Bring it properly to a boilCornstarch does not reach full thickening power until the mixture actually bubbles, and undercooked starch tastes raw and chalky. One minute at a boil, stirring, is enough; longer boiling begins to thin it again.
- Expect a thin sauceHalf a teaspoon of starch to a cup and a half of liquid gives a sauce barely thicker than cream. That is intentional for pouring over pudding. For something that coats a spoon, a full teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half of starch is nearer modern taste.
- Jelly, not jamThe recipe means a clear strained fruit jelly, which dissolves cleanly and gives a glossy sauce. Jam or preserves will work but leave pulp and seeds, and are usually sweeter, so cut the added sugar.
- Sweetness will varyJellies differ in sugar content, so taste once the jelly has melted and adjust the added sugar to suit.
- ServingAbout a cup and a half, enough for six servings of pudding. Serve warm; it will thicken a little as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a spoonful of water.
Sweet starch-thickened sauces were the standard finish for the boiled, steamed and baked puddings that anchored American dessert courses through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the era typically gave a whole cluster of them together: hard sauce, wine sauce, lemon sauce, jelly sauce. This one exists because a well-run household had jelly on hand by the shelf-full. Fruit jelly was among the most reliably preserved products of a summer kitchen, and a jar of it converted in minutes into a sauce, a tart filling, or a glaze. The Dixie Cook Book, one of the many regional adaptations of the compiled "Practical Housekeeping" volumes that circulated widely in the 1880s, reflects that thrift throughout: the note that "any other fruit jelly may be used" is the whole point, since the recipe is really a formula for using up whatever the pantry holds.