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Fruit Sauce
Cut into small dice pieces half a peeled, seeded pear, quarter of a peeled and cored apple, half a canned apricot, six preserved, stoned cherries, two slices of peeled and cored pineapple and any other fruit at hand. Place all these fruits in a small pan with two ounces sugar, one gill water, one tablespoon kirsch and one tablespoon maraschino; boil for five minutes and use as required.
A compôte-style sauce for puddings, ices and plain cake, built from whatever fruit is on hand. The proportions matter more than the specific fruits.
- A gill5 fl oz in imperial measure (a quarter of an imperial pint), 4 fl oz if read as a US gill; so roughly half to two-thirds of a cup. With 2 oz sugar (a scant third of a cup) that gives a light syrup rather than a thick glaze.
- YieldThe quantities as written make comfortably more than a cup of sauce, depending on how much extra fruit goes in. Scale up freely; the sugar-to-water ratio holds.
- Dice sizeCut everything to the same small dice, about a quarter inch. Uneven pieces mean the apple is still raw when the pear has collapsed.
- Five minutes is the limitThis is the hinge. The sauce is meant to stay a suspension of distinct fruit in syrup, not a jam. Pull it off the heat while the apple still has some resistance.
- Canned and preserved fruitThe apricot and cherries are already cooked and sweetened; add them in the last minute or so, or they will shred. Canned fruit in heavy syrup brings its own sugar, so taste before adding all the sugar.
- Pineapple"Two slices" reads as two rings, cored; whether fresh or tinned is not specified. If fresh, the brief boil deactivates the bromelain, which matters if you later want the sauce to set with gelatin.
- Kirsch and maraschinoBoth are clear spirits-based liqueurs: the kirsch dry, the maraschino sweetened but not syrupy. Today's maraschino liqueur is the right thing, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Adding them at the start, as written, boils off much of the alcohol and leaves the flavour. Add them off the heat instead if you want the spirit to read more strongly.
- ServingGood warm over rice pudding, steamed pudding or ice cream, and equally good chilled. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
Fruit sauces of this kind were a standing item in the sauce chapters of professional kitchen manuals of the period, where the aim was to convert leftover compôte fruit, tinned apricots and the jar of preserved cherries into something that could be ladled over a plain pudding at short notice. Kirsch and maraschino were both stocked as standard by hotel kitchens and appear together in the desserts of the Escoffier generation — kirsch distilled from cherries in Alsace, the Black Forest and Switzerland, and maraschino made in Dalmatia from the marasca cherry. The instruction to add "any other fruit at hand" suggests a book written for a cook with a larder rather than a shopping list, trusted to judge what would hold up to five minutes in syrup.