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Caramel Sauce
1 Cupful Sugar. 21/3 Cupfuls Boiling Water 1/2 Tablespoonful Snowdrift 1 Tablespoonful Cornstarch 1/8 Teaspoonful Salt 1/2 Teaspoonful Vanilla Caramelize the sugar in a medium-sized, heavy sauce-pan, or small frying-pan (this means melting it over a slow heat until it has become somewhat syrupy and the color of maple syrup). Add the water, cook until the sugar is dissolved and then add the Snowdrift, cornstarch and salt, creamed together, stir until thick and allow it to boil for three minutes. Then add the vanilla. Use hot with Cottage Pudding, Steamed Snow Puffs, any Bread Pudding, Rice Pudding, or on Ice Cream; or cold on Ice Cream, with moulded Tapioca Pudding, Cornstarch Pudding, or individual Baked Custards, which have been turned out.
A dry-caramel sauce thickened with a cornstarch-and-fat paste, from a shortening manufacturer's promotional cookbook. The ingredient list as printed has lost a line, so read the method carefully before you start.
- The missing sugarThe instructions begin "caramelize the sugar," but no sugar appears in the list. Either the sugar line has been dropped altogether or the run-together "21/3 Cupfuls Boiling Water" conceals two collapsed lines; there is no way to tell from the page. The quantities are genuinely unrecoverable; work from a sauce recipe with a stated sugar weight rather than guessing.
- What Snowdrift wasA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company (hydrogenated in its later formulations), comparable to modern vegetable shortening. Half a tablespoon is a trivial amount here, present mainly to carry the cornstarch; unsalted butter does the same job and tastes better.
- Dry caramel needs attention, not stirringMelting sugar alone over low heat is the hinge of this sauce. Swirl the pan rather than stirring, and pull it from the heat the moment it reaches the color of maple syrup — the residual heat of a heavy pan will carry it several shades darker, and burnt caramel is bitter beyond rescue.
- Adding the waterBoiling water hitting molten sugar erupts violently and the caramel seizes into a hard lump. Add it in a slow stream with the pan off the heat, stand back, then return to low heat and stir until the lump redissolves. Cold water works too but takes longer to melt the mass.
- Creaming the starchRubbing the cornstarch into the soft fat with the salt keeps it from lumping when it meets hot liquid — the period's substitute for slurrying starch in cold water. Either method works; do not tip dry cornstarch into the hot syrup.
- The three-minute boilCornstarch thickens at around 200F but tastes raw until it has boiled briefly, which is what the three minutes buys. Longer boiling breaks the gel down and the sauce thins again on standing.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, a genre that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century when hydrogenated and refined vegetable fats were competing hard against lard and butter in American kitchens. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and books like this one existed to demonstrate that the product could stand in anywhere fat was called for — including, as here, in half-tablespoon quantities where it makes almost no difference to the finished dish. The sauce itself is older than the brand: caramelized sugar dissolved in water and bound with cornstarch is often described as a staple sweet sauce of the late Victorian and Edwardian household, cheap, shelf-stable in its ingredients, and designed to be ladled over the plain steamed and baked puddings that the list at the end of the recipe faithfully catalogues.