Home › October › Vanilla Sauce
Vanilla Sauce
1 tablespoon corn-starch. 1 cup sugar. 1/8 teaspoon salt. 2 cups boiling water. 1½ teaspoons vanilla. 2 tablespoons butter.
PROCESS: Mix corn-starch, sugar and salt, add water slowly, stirring constantly. Boil gently eight minutes, remove from range, add vanilla, and butter in small bits; stir until well blended.
A clear cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the sort that once accompanied every steamed pudding, cottage pudding or baked apple. It comes together in under fifteen minutes and needs only attention at two moments.
- The hinge: cook the starch outEight minutes of gentle boiling is not padding. Cornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two, but undercooked starch tastes raw and chalky, so keep it at a bare simmer, stirring, for the full time. Butter and vanilla go in off the heat: boiling drives off vanilla's aromatics, and butter stirred in away from the range blends glossily rather than separating.
- Add the water slowly, and hotMixing the starch dry with the sugar is the lump insurance — the sugar crystals keep the granules apart. Dribble in the boiling water while stirring rather than dumping it, or the surface starch gels instantly into knots.
- "Remove from range"The range is the coal or gas cook stove, and the instruction means take the pan off the heat. On modern equipment pull the pan off the burner; an electric element holds heat long enough to keep the sauce simmering if you leave it in place.
- Pan choiceUse a heavy-bottomed saucepan. A thin pan will scorch the sugar on the bottom during the eight-minute boil, and scorched sugar in a white sauce is not recoverable.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve warm; it thickens considerably as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a spoonful of water or milk.
Vanilla sauce belongs to a family of "pudding sauces" — hard sauce, lemon sauce, foamy sauce — that were common in American home cooking when dessert often meant a plain steamed or baked pudding needing something poured over it. What distinguishes this version is that it is thickened with cornstarch and water rather than eggs and cream: cheaper, faster, and keeping its ingredients on the pantry shelf. Cornstarch was by this period a well-established domestic thickener alongside older egg and arrowroot methods, and vanilla extract was an ordinary bottled grocery item.