Lemon Sauce
Observe the proportions and directions, as given for Nutmeg Sauce, omitting the nutmeg and adding one and one-half tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. 1/2 Cupful Snowdrift Few Grains Salt
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's Nutmeg Sauce and changes two things. A few notes on what the fragments on the page mean.
- Read the parent recipe firstThe proportions here are incomplete by design — only the shortening and the salt are restated. You need the full Nutmeg Sauce entry for the sugar, liquid and method; without it the half cupful and few grains are meaningless.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening promoted heavily in the American South in the early twentieth century, and the reason this book exists. Half a cupful of butter can be substituted measure for measure in a dessert sauce.
- "Few grains salt"Something under 1/8 teaspoon. In a sweet sauce built on a neutral fat it is doing real work, sharpening the sugar and the lemon; do not skip it.
- The lemon juiceOne and a half tablespoonfuls is roughly the yield of half a medium lemon. Add it last and a little at a time — acid stirred into a creamed fat-and-sugar mixture too quickly can make it look curdled. A little grated zest carries more lemon aroma than juice alone.
- If the parent sauce contains raw eggSome hard sauces of this period add an uncooked egg or yolk to the creamed fat and sugar, served cold over hot pudding. If that is what the Nutmeg Sauce specifies, use pasteurised egg or leave it out.
- Hot-water versionsSome sauces in this family are thinned with boiling water or milk and warmed. If so, keep it below a simmer once the lemon is in; an acidic sauce built on shortening can separate if boiled.
- Yield and servingServing -- Intended for steamed or baked puddings, cottage pudding and gingerbread, spooned on while the pudding is hot.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to a genre that flourished from the 1890s through the 1920s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern cotton-oil industry, which had turned what was once a waste product of ginning into a cheap cooking fat, and its cookbooks worked steadily to place it wherever butter or lard had been. Sweet pudding sauces were useful territory: an old-fashioned hard sauce is little more than creamed fat and sugar, so the fat's performance is on open display, and a book could spin one base recipe into variations such as nutmeg and lemon with a line or two apiece \— which is exactly what has happened here. The lemon variant is the plainest of the family, a sharp cold sauce to cut a heavy hot crumb.