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Groseille-Maraschino Sauce
Dilute in a small saucepan four tablespoons currant jelly with one tablespoon fine sugar, two tablespoons maraschino and half gill water. Set the pan on the fire, let slowly boil for three minutes, and use as directed.
A three-minute dessert sauce built on currant jelly, thinned with liqueur and water. The whole thing hinges on using real maraschino liqueur rather than the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 2 fluid ounces. The finished sauce comes to roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four small servings poured over ice cream, poached fruit or a plain sponge.
- Maraschino means the liqueurHere this is the clear, dry cherry-kernel liqueur from Dalmatia and Italy, not the bright red syrup that now surrounds bottled cherries. The modern syrup is largely sugar and almond flavouring and will make the sauce cloying; buy the liqueur.
- GroseilleFrench for currant. The jelly should be red currant, which is tart enough to carry the added sugar. Grape or apple jelly gives a flat, one-note sauce.
- Dilute before heatingWork the jelly, sugar, liqueur and water together in the cold pan with a spoon or small whisk until the jelly has broken up. Jelly dropped whole into hot liquid sets into rubbery lumps that take much longer to disperse.
- Three minutes and no moreA short boil is enough to dissolve the sugar and take the raw edge off the spirit. Longer reduction concentrates the pectin in the jelly and the sauce will set to a glaze as it cools.
- StrainingIf the jelly has not dissolved perfectly smooth, a pass through a fine sieve while hot gives a clear, glossy surface.
- Serving temperatureIt pours best warm and thickens noticeably in the refrigerator. Reheat gently with a spoonful of water to loosen it rather than boiling it again.
Sauces of this type — a fruit jelly let down with water and a spirit, boiled just long enough to marry — were often used as a finish for cold sweets in the international hotel kitchens that books like this one drew on. Red currant jelly was the workhorse: cheap, reliably tart, high in pectin, and already on hand for the Cumberland sauces and glazes of the savoury side. Maraschino, distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed stones around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was one of the most fashionable flavourings in European confectionery from the nineteenth century onward, and it appears constantly in period dessert work. Its name later attached itself to the preserved cherries that were originally steeped in it, which is why an American reader now hears "maraschino" and thinks of a red glacé cherry rather than a dry, aromatic liqueur — a shift worth keeping in mind whenever an older recipe calls for it by name.