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Fresh Strawberry Sauce
Press through a sieve into a small saucepan a half pint picked fresh strawberries; add two ounces sugar, one tablespoon kirsch and one gill water and let boil on the range for ten minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Remove and use as required.
A plain fruit sauce built on three ingredients and a sieve. The only real decisions are how long you boil it and whether the kirsch survives.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces in American measure (an imperial gill is 5). With 2 ounces of sugar (a little over a quarter cup by volume) this gives a thin, pourable syrup rather than a coulis.
- Half pint of strawberriesMeasured as fruit, not liquid: about a cup of berries, roughly 5 to 6 ounces. Pressed through a sieve that yields something like half a cup of purée.
- Pressing through the sieveRaw berries go through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle easily enough, but the seeds clog it. Work in batches and scrape the underside. A food mill or a blitz-then-strain is faster and gives the same result.
- The ten-minute boilThis is the point worth reconsidering. Ten minutes at a boil drives off nearly all the kirsch and cooks the fresh strawberry flavour into something closer to jam. Two to three minutes is enough to dissolve the sugar and thicken slightly; if you want the full ten minutes of reduction, add the kirsch at the end off the heat.
- KirschA clear, unsweetened cherry brandy, dry and quite sharp. Not cherry liqueur or maraschino, which are sweet and would unbalance the sugar. A tablespoon is enough to read as almond and cherry behind the fruit.
- Yield and useAbout three quarters of a cup, enough for four servings spooned over ice cream, poached peaches, rice pudding or a plain sponge. It thickens as it cools; thin with a spoonful of water if it sets too heavy.
- KeepingCooked and sugared, it holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator. The colour dulls from bright red toward brick after the first day.
Sauces of this kind sit in the section of turn-of-the-century cookbooks where the fruit course and the ice cream course meet, and they exist because a good hotel kitchen needed something to pour over the plain moulded creams and iced puddings that filled out a long menu. The method is straight from the professional repertoire: sieve, sugar, boil, done, with no thickener and no egg, which is why the instructions end with "use as required" rather than a dish. Kirsch was a common flavouring for red fruit in French and Swiss practice, valued because its almond note, which comes from cherry kernels, echoes rather than covers the flavour of the fruit. The book gives weights for sugar and volumes for liquid, and calls the stove "the range."