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Minnehaha Sauce
Beat, in a two quart bowl, four table-spoons butter and two thirds pint brown sugar, to a cream, with a wooden spoon; then add four table-spoons sweet cream, then the juice and grated rind of a large lemon; place the bowl on top of the tea-kettle half full of boiling water; when melted to a thick creamy froth, serve.
A frothy warm dessert sauce built over gentle heat, meant for steamed or boiled puddings. The whole thing turns on temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it get hotThe bowl sits over the kettle's steam, not in the water, and the mixture should only warm until it slackens into a glossy froth. Direct heat or a hard simmer will melt the butter out and leave a greasy, grainy pool.
- Vessel substitutionA bowl balanced on a kettle spout is an improvised double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, with the bowl bottom clear of the water.
- Two thirds pint brown sugarA pint is 2 cups, so this is roughly 1 1/3 cups packed brown sugar. Period brown sugar was moister and less uniform than today's; either light or dark brown will serve, though the period product was often less refined than modern light brown.
- Butter and cream measuresFour tablespoons butter is 1/4 cup, or half a stick. Four tablespoons sweet cream is 1/4 cup fresh cream — "sweet" here distinguishes it from the soured or clabbered cream also kept in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Heavy cream is the right modern choice.
- Creaming by handThe wooden spoon and the two-quart bowl are there because the butter and sugar must be beaten light before any liquid goes in. A hand mixer does it in two minutes; the volume you build is what later becomes the froth.
- LemonGrate the zest before juicing. Add the acid last and off the heat, as the original directs, or the cream can break when it meets both acid and warmth at once.
- Yield and servingPerhaps 1 1/2 to 2 cups, though the recipe gives no yield; enough for six to eight servings. Spoon it warm over steamed pudding, baked apples or plain cake; it stiffens as it cools and can be rewarmed over steam.
The name comes from Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855), whose heroine Minnehaha the poet glossed as "Laughing Water" — a fitting label for a sauce whose whole point is that it froths. The poem was among the most widely read works in American households of the period, and the name was applied broadly to steamboats, hotels and confections, though in the case of Minnehaha Falls the borrowing ran the other way: Longfellow took the name from published accounts of the Minnesota falls. Structurally the sauce belongs to the large family of creamed butter-and-sugar pudding sauces of the period, close kin to hard sauce and to the various "foamy" and "frothy" sauces of the same decades, distinguished chiefly by being warmed to a foam rather than served cold and firm.