Nutmeg Sauce
2/3 Cupful Sugar 1¼ Cupfuls Boiling Water 1¼ Tablespoonfuls Flour 11/2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1/2 Teaspoonful Nutmeg Teaspoonful Salt Combine the sugar, flour and salt, and mix thoroughly. Gradually pour in the boiling water, add the Snowdrift, stirring constantly, bring to boiling-point and boil for five minutes. Then add the nutmeg and serve hot.
A plain boiled sweet sauce for steamed and baked puddings, thickened with flour rather than eggs or cornstarch. It comes together in about ten minutes on the stovetop.
- SnowdriftSnowdrift was a branded cottonseed-oil shortening, the whole reason this book exists. Butter is the natural substitute here and improves the flavour; any neutral solid shortening will behave the same way.
- Flour quantity is unclearThe flour figure as printed is not usable. For a sauce of this style, roughly one tablespoon of flour per cup of liquid gives a pourable consistency; two makes it thick enough to mound on a spoon.
- SaltThe salt measure has lost its fraction. A quarter teaspoon is right for this volume — enough to lift the sugar without reading as savoury.
- Lump preventionThe hinge of the method is combining the dry sugar, flour and salt before any liquid touches them. Sugar keeps the flour particles apart, so the boiling water can go in without setting off lumps. Pour it in a thin stream and keep stirring.
- The five-minute boilNot padding. Flour-thickened sauces taste raw and pasty unless the starch is cooked well past thickening point. Keep it at a genuine simmer and stir the bottom, since sugar syrups scorch quickly.
- Nutmeg lastAdding nutmeg after the boil is deliberate — its aromatics are volatile and drive off in a long simmer. Grate it fresh if you can; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its character within months.
- YieldThe liquid measure as printed is unusable, so the yield can only be guessed at; expect enough for several modest servings of pudding. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Flour-thickened sweet sauces like this one were the everyday partner to steamed, boiled and baked puddings in American home cooking, cheaper and steadier than a custard and far less trouble than a hard sauce beaten with butter. Nutmeg was a common pudding spice of the period, sold whole and grated at the table or the stove, and nutmeg graters were widely used kitchen tools. The recipe's real purpose, though, is promotional: Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, and books like this one were issued by manufacturers to teach cooks to reach for the tin wherever a recipe had once said butter or lard. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton industry, and its conversion into a solid kitchen fat around the turn of the twentieth century reshaped American baking.