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Apricot Sauce
Press through a sieve a pint fine canned apricots with their liquor; then place in a saucepan on the fire, with half teaspoon vanilla essence, one tablespoon maraschino and one tablespoon Swiss kirsch. Mix well and gently heat for five minutes, being very careful not to let it boil; then it will be ready to use. (Always place syrups from canned fruits in stone jars and utilise for seasoning, etc.)
A dessert sauce of the classic hotel kitchen: sieved canned apricot spiked with two liqueurs and warmed, never boiled. It comes together in ten minutes and keeps a week refrigerated.
- Do not let it boilKeep it at a gentle heat, well below a simmer, and take it off after the five minutes the recipe specifies. Boiling would drive off the spirits that carry much of the aroma.
- A pint of apricotsFruit and syrup together. Read as 16 fl oz if the measure is American, 20 fl oz if imperial; roughly one to one and a half standard cans. Modern canned apricots in light syrup work; those in heavy syrup will give a sweeter, thicker sauce.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a fine sieve gives the smoothest result and removes any skin. A blender followed by a single pass through a sieve is faster and loses nothing.
- MaraschinoThis means the clear Italian cherry-stone liqueur, Luxardo or similar, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cocktail cherries. The two are unrelated in flavour.
- Swiss kirschKirschwasser, a dry unsweetened cherry brandy. Any good kirsch will do; avoid sweetened cherry cordials, which will push the sauce over into candy.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract, half a teaspoon.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce eight to ten servings of poached fruit, ice cream, rice pudding or a plain sponge.
- The note on syrupsSound advice, though a stone jar on the shelf is not. Keep leftover canning syrup in a covered jar in the refrigerator and use it within a week or two for poaching or sweetening drinks.
Fruit purée thinned with its own syrup and lifted with a spirit is one of the standard sauces of the French restaurant repertoire, where an apricot sauce, sieved and barely warmed, was the usual accompaniment to cold puddings, charlottes and poached fruit. Maraschino and kirsch are paired here as two stone-fruit distillates, one sweet and floral, one dry and sharp. The instruction to save canning syrup in stone jars suggests a kitchen in which a sweetened by-product was worth keeping, and that canned apricots — reliable, year-round, already sweetened — were treated as a dependable ingredient rather than a compromise.