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Plum Sauce
Soak a half pound California prunes in cold water eight hours; drain place in a saucepan with a good gill claret, two ounces sugar and two saltspoons ground cinnamon. Cover pan and slowly boil ten minutes; carefully lift up prunes with the skimmer and keep them on a plate until required. Add one and a half gills of demi-glace to the syrup and let reduce on a brisk fire twenty minutes, add prunes, boil five minutes more and use as required.
A savoury fruit sauce built on stock rather than a dessert compote — the demi-glace is what makes it work, and it is the one component you cannot skip or fake with water.
- GillA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So a "good gill" of claret is a generous half cup, and one and a half gills of demi-glace is about 3/4 cup.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two of them gives 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon for the whole batch.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal or beef stock thickened with espagnole — rich, gelatinous and lightly salted. Commercial demi-glace concentrates work; thin canned broth does not, since the sauce relies on that body to coat rather than run.
- California prunesDried plums, sold as prunes or dried plums today. Half a pound is roughly a cup and a half. Pitted fruit saves trouble at the table, though whole stone-in prunes hold their shape better through two boilings.
- ClaretA dry red Bordeaux in 1900 usage. Any dry, moderately tannic red serves; avoid anything sweet, as the prunes and the two ounces of sugar (about 1/4 cup) already carry the sweetness.
- Removing the prunesLifting the fruit out before the long reduction looks deliberate: twenty minutes on a brisk fire would risk breaking the prunes down, whereas taken out they can be returned whole for the final five minutes.
- ReductionTwenty minutes over high heat should take the liquid to a glossy, spoon-coating consistency. Judge by thickness rather than the clock — pan width changes everything.
- Yield and servingPerhaps a cup and a half of sauce with the fruit. The recipe says only 'use as required'; a sauce of this kind would conventionally accompany roast duck, goose, venison or pork.
Sauces of stewed dried fruit thickened with meat stock sit at the older end of European cookery, where the modern division between sweet and savoury had not yet hardened; medieval and Renaissance kitchens routinely sharpened roast meat with prunes, currants and wine, and the practice persisted in the game cookery of Germany, Alsace and central Europe. That this version specifies California prunes is the interesting detail: by the time The International Cook Book appeared, the Santa Clara Valley had made California a major prune-growing region supplying export markets, so the phrase may be read as a nod to a familiar commercial product rather than mere local colour. The demi-glace base points to a restaurant kitchen in the French classical manner, where a base sauce was kept at the ready and small compound sauces like this were finished to order.