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Raspberry Sauce
Have in a small saucepan four tablespoons raspberry jam with one ounce sugar, one gill water and one teaspoon kirschwasser; mix well for one minute, then boil on the range for two minutes, occasionally mixing, and use as directed.
A two-minute jam sauce of the sort a hotel kitchen kept at hand for puddings and ices. The measurements are pre-standardization but all resolve cleanly.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The proportion of water to jam is what sets the finished thickness, so measure it rather than pouring by eye.
- An ounce of sugarA weight, not a fluid ounce: about 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. If your jam is already very sweet, cut it to a teaspoon or leave it out.
- KirschwasserClear, unsweetened cherry brandy, sold now as kirsch. Framboise or a plain brandy substitutes without much loss. Much of the spirit's bite will boil off in the two minutes, so add a second teaspoon off the heat if you want the spirit to read.
- The two minutes matterThat short boil dissolves the sugar and cooks off the raw jam taste while keeping the sauce pourable. Boil it much longer and it will reduce and thicken toward a glaze.
- Strain or don'tThe original leaves the seeds in. Pushing the finished sauce through a fine sieve gives the smooth, glossy coulis you'd expect on a modern plate; the seeds are traditional and harmless either way.
- Yield and useRoughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup, enough for about four servings. "Use as directed" points back to whatever dessert it accompanies in the book; it suits ice cream, poached pears, rice pudding or a Bavarian cream. Good warm or chilled.
- Consistency checkIt thickens noticeably as it cools. Judge it cold on a spoon back, and thin with a spoonful of water if it has gone past pouring.
Raspberry sauce belongs to the family of simple sweet sauces that Escoffier-era kitchens made from jam, which was available year-round and gave dependable body from its pectin and sugar. A related classic, sauce Melba, is generally traced to Escoffier's peach dessert for the soprano Nellie Melba in the 1890s, and by the time this book appeared such a sauce was standard equipment for ices, charlottes and molded creams. The kirschwasser is worth noting: a scant teaspoon of a colorless cherry spirit, used the way a cook uses salt in savory work, to sharpen and lift a flavor rather than to be tasted on its own. The International Cook Book collects exactly this kind of hotel-kitchen building block, written in the terse voice of someone dictating to staff who already knew what it was for.