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Orange Sauce
Make a syrup by boiling one cup sugar with one-fourth cup water and two shavings of orange rind, four minutes. Remove from range, lift out orange peel, add one-half tablespoon butter and one tablespoon each of orange and lemon juice and Sherry wine.
A quick dessert sauce built on a short sugar syrup — the sort of thing meant to be spooned hot over a steamed pudding, cottage pudding or plain cake. It takes about ten minutes and needs only attention to the syrup stage.
- The hinge: four minutes means four minutesOne cup sugar to a quarter cup water is a very concentrated syrup, and at a hard boil it climbs through thread stage quickly. Time it from the moment it boils; boiled much beyond that it will cool to a thick, candy-like mass rather than a pouring sauce.
- "Remove from range"The range is the stovetop. Take the pan off the heat entirely before adding the butter and juices, or the cold liquid hitting a very hot syrup will spit.
- Two shavings of orange rindPare two wide strips of zest with a vegetable peeler, avoiding the white pith, which turns the syrup bitter. They are there for perfume only and come out before the sauce is finished.
- Butter quantityHalf a tablespoon is not a typo — this is a glossing amount, not a butter sauce. Add it off the heat and swirl rather than stir hard.
- The SherryA dry or medium amontillado suits it better than cream sherry, which compounds the sugar. It is added off the heat and not cooked, so much of the alcohol remains; leave it out for children and add a little more orange juice.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly three-quarters of a cup. Serve warm; it thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a spoonful of water or orange juice.
Sauces like this one belong to the long American tradition of the "pudding sauce" — a sweet, often wine-spiked pour meant to redeem a plain steamed or baked pudding, which is generally said to have been a common everyday dessert before cakes and pies became weeknight food. Nineteenth-century manuals list them by the dozen: hard sauce, foamy sauce, lemon sauce, vanilla sauce, all variations on sugar plus fat plus flavouring. The presence of oranges is itself something of a period marker: by 1900 the Florida and California citrus industries and refrigerated rail cars are often credited with making oranges a more widely available grocery item rather than a seasonal treat, and cookbook writers used them freely. 52 Sunday Dinners was organised as a full year of menus, so a sauce like this appears not as a standalone recipe but as one component of a Sunday meal already planned around it.