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Lemon Sauce (Two cups sugar two eggs juice)
Two cups sugar, two eggs, juice and rind of two lemons; beat all together, and just before serving add pint boiling water; set on stove, and when at boiling point, serve. Never boil sauce after adding lemon, as it makes it bitter. Some add one-third cup but ter and table-spoon corn starch.
A pudding sauce of the sweet, pourable kind, thickened lightly by egg rather than flour. It comes together in minutes and is best made while the pudding is turning out.
- The hingeDo not let it boil once the lemon juice is in. The original says this makes it bitter; the greater risk is that the acid plus heat curdles the egg into visible threads. Bring it just to the point of steaming and shivering, then take it off.
- Temper the eggsAdding a pint of boiling water straight into beaten egg and sugar works only if the water goes in slowly and the whisk never stops. Pour in a thin stream, whisking hard, then return the lot to low heat.
- Rind means zestTake only the yellow outer layer of the two lemons, grated or pared in strips and fished out at the end. Pith carried over with the rind is bitter and worth avoiding, though the original attributes the bitterness to boiling the sauce after the lemon goes in.
- A pintAn American pint, 2 cups or roughly 475 ml. The finished sauce is thin and glossy, closer to a syrup than a custard.
- The optional additionsA third cup of butter, whisked in off the heat at the end, gives something near a lemon butter sauce. The tablespoon of cornstarch should be slaked in a little cold water first and will give a slightly cloudy, spoon-coating body the better choice if the sauce must sit.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to two lemons is very sweet by current taste, suited to the plain steamed and boiled puddings such sauces usually accompanied. Against a modern cake or a rich pudding, 1 to 1 1/4 cups is closer to the mark.
- YieldEnough for eight to ten servings. It does not reheat well once the egg has set; make it to order.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks treat pudding sauce as a category in its own right, with lemon, hard sauce and "liquid sauce" listed side by side, because the puddings themselves - boiled batter puddings, steamed suet puddings, cottage pudding, plain cornstarch blancmange - were plain and depended on the sauce for flavor. Lemons were an imported fruit that became more widely available in inland American towns in the later nineteenth century as rail freight improved, which may be why a book compiled in Marysville, Ohio, can call for two of them without comment. The collection first appeared in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled at Marysville, Ohio, and was reissued from 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping; it was assembled from contributed recipes. The tacked-on final sentence - "Some add one-third cup butter and table-spoon corn starch" - is typical of the book's habit of recording variants alongside the main version.