No. 447

Cherry Sauce

Sauce aux Cerises

Lay in a saucepan, half a pound of currant jelly with six cloves, a small stick of cinnamon, two orange peels, one ounce of meat glaze. (No. 401), half a pint of veal blond (No. 423), one pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), one gill of Burgundy, and four ounces of dried and pounded cherries, let all boil together for a few minutes, then add the strained juice of two oranges, mix all together well, and serve.

Another way is to have a quarter of a pound of dried black cherries with their pits; soften them in cold water, and pound them in a mortar with three gills of red wine; pour the preparation into an untinned copper vessel, add a small stick of cinnamon, and two cloves, also a piece of lemon peel; let the liquid boil for two minutes, then thicken it with a teaspoonful of fecula diluted with a little cold water; remove it to the side of the fire, cover, and keep it warm without boiling for fifteen minutes, then strain through a sieve and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer gives two methods here, and the second one carries two hazards that rule it out for a modern cook. The points below explain the terms and the specific problems.

Untinned copperThe second method calls for boiling cherries and red wine in an untinned copper vessel. Acidic liquid held hot in bare copper dissolves copper salts into the food. Bare copper was used in nineteenth-century kitchens for colour effects, most famously to green pickles and vegetables; why Ranhofer specifies it here he does not say. Copper poisoning from cooking acid foods in unlined copper was recognised at the time and the practice was abandoned for good reason.
Pounded cherry pitsThe pits are pounded with the fruit to lend a kirsch-like bitter-almond note. Cherry kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. How much ends up in a strained sauce made from a quarter pound of stoned-in cherries is not something the recipe lets you calculate, and brief boiling cannot be relied on to drive it off. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds a controlled ingredient.
What to make insteadUse a current recipe for a cherry sauce for game or ham. The dish itself is sound; only these two procedures are not.
The cross-referencesThe first method depends on three other numbers in The Epicurean: meat glaze (No. 401) is stock reduced to a syrup, veal blond (No. 423) a pale veal stock, espagnole (No. 414) the brown mother sauce, and it is built on all three. Without them the recipe is unmakeable as printed.
Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so one gill of Burgundy is 4 fl oz and three gills is 12 fl oz. "Fecula" is potato starch, used as a slurry thickener much as cornstarch is now.
Currant jellyThe recipe says simply 'currant jelly', which in this period and context would normally mean red currant, and it is doing the work of both sugar and acid. Red currant jelly was a standing pantry item in a professional kitchen of the 1890s and is still sold, though it is now shelved as a preserve rather than a sauce base.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print: a few hundred base preparations, cross-referenced by number, from which the rest of the book is assembled. Sauce aux cerises belongs to the classic French repertoire of sweet-sharp sauces for game, venison and ham, alongside the brown sauce poivrade and the cold fruit-and-port relish Cumberland, where fruit acidity cuts rich dark meat. The bitter-almond flavour of crushed cherry kernels was prized in period cooking and appears in ratafias, noyau and kirsch as well. The untinned copper pan is a period marker of a different kind: tinned copper was standard for cooking, and calling specifically for bare copper signals a colour-fixing trick that professional kitchens used and domestic manuals of the same decades were already warning against.