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Every-Day Sauce
To one pint boiling water, add heaping tea-cup sugar, table-spoon butter (see General Directions), pinch of salt, and table-spoon corn starch dissolved in cold water; season with nutmeg or vanilla, boil half an hour, and if good and well cooked it will be very clear. Or, to a table-spoon of currant jelly, add a table-spoon of hot water; beat well and add to the above just before serving, omitting all other flavoring. Or, add a tea-spoon of raspberry syrup.
A plain cornstarch pudding sauce of the kind poured over steamed puddings, boiled batter puddings and plain cake. Two things in the original need translating: the vessel-based measures and the half-hour boil.
- The half-hour boilCornstarch reaches full thickening power soon after it comes to the boil, and a long hard boil is more likely to break the starch down and drive off much of the liquid than to improve the sauce. Two or three minutes at a gentle simmer, stirring, will thicken it; the recipe's own test is clarity, not time.
- TeacupNineteenth-century teacup measures are generally reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the figure is not fixed; heaping means the sugar is mounded above the rim, so figure roughly 3/4 to 1 cup. With a pint of water that is a frankly sweet sauce by current taste, and cutting it to 1/2 cup is reasonable.
- "See General Directions"The cross-reference sends the reader back to the book's general directions rather than spelling anything out here. Take the tablespoon as solid butter, about half an ounce, 15 g.
- Dissolving the starchSlake the tablespoon of cornstarch in two or three tablespoons of cold water until smooth before it goes near the pan. Added dry it will seize into lumps that no amount of boiling will smooth out.
- Vanilla goes in lastVanilla extract is volatile and largely cooks off. Add it after the pan comes off the heat. Nutmeg can go in early, and freshly grated is worth the trouble here since there is nothing else to hide behind.
- The jelly variationBeating a spoonful of currant jelly with hot water thins it enough to stir in smoothly, and it will tint the sauce pink and add a little acidity. The recipe has you omit the other flavoring when the jelly goes in; the raspberry syrup, already liquid, can simply be stirred through.
- Yield and servingRoughly two cups, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve warm; it thickens as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a spoonful of water.
Sauces like this one are the workhorse of nineteenth-century American dessert cookery: a sweetened, lightly thickened liquid poured hot over steamed and boiled puddings, which were dense and often plain and depended on the sauce for both moisture and flavor. This version leans on cornstarch. Cornstarch manufacture in the United States dates from the 1840s, though edible cornstarch became a common household article more in the 1850s and 60s u2014 well before Buckeye Cookery (1877) u2014 and it took its place alongside the older thickeners of flour, arrowroot and egg, which remained in wide use, because it gave a clear, glossy result rather than a pasty one, which is exactly the test Buckeye Cookery applies when it says a well-cooked sauce "will be very clear." The currant jelly and raspberry syrup variants show the same thrift running through the rest of the book: one base formula, redirected by whatever preserve is on the shelf.