Vinegar Sauce
One and a half cups sugar, one and a half table-spoons flour in a little water, two table-spoons vinegar, quarter of a grated nutmeg, and a pinch of salt; pour over this one and a half pints boiling water, and boil ten minutes; just before taking from stove add one dessert-spoon of butter. - Mrs. G. W. Collins, Urbana.
A thin, sweet-sour pudding sauce of the kind ladled hot over steamed or boiled puddings. The only technical step is the flour slurry, and the only thing that will spoil it is lumps.
- Dessert-spoonA dessert-spoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: about 2 teaspoons. So the finishing butter is roughly 10 g, stirred in at the very end, just before the pan comes off the stove as the recipe directs.
- Liquid volumeOne and a half pints is 3 cups of boiling water. With only 1½ tablespoons of flour thickening it, the result is deliberately pourable, closer to a syrup than a gravy.
- Slur the flour first"In a little water" means a smooth paste before anything hot touches it — 2 to 3 tablespoons of cold water whisked into the flour. Adding boiling water to dry flour is the one way this sauce fails.
- Ten minutes is not too longUnlike an egg or butter sauce, this is flour and sugar, so the full ten minutes at a simmer is wanted: it cooks out the raw flour taste and reduces the sauce slightly. Stir often, as the sugar concentration makes it catch.
- VinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar. Cider vinegar would have been readily available in a nineteenth-century Ohio kitchen and its mildness suits the sugar. Distilled white vinegar works but is sharper; taste at the end and add a little more if the sauce reads flat.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole nutmeg grated fresh is close to a rounded ½ teaspoon. Pre-ground is weaker and duller; if using it, start at ½ teaspoon and add more.
- Yield and servingMakes about 3 cups, enough for eight to ten servings. Serve hot over steamed suet, bread, cottage or Indian pudding; it thickens noticeably as it cools and can be thinned with a splash of boiling water when reheated.
Sweet sauces like this one are the reason so many nineteenth-century puddings taste plain on their own — the pudding was the vehicle and the sauce carried the sugar, spice and richness. A vinegar sauce belongs to the frugal end of that family: no wine, no brandy, no eggs, no cream, just sugar thickened with flour and given a bite of acid so it does not cloy, which is much the same logic behind the lemon sauces that often sit near it in pudding chapters. *Buckeye Cookery* (whose early editions are variously dated 1876 and 1877, and which seems to be the source here rather than being named in the recipe itself) was assembled from contributions by named housekeepers across the state, and the attribution to Mrs. G. W. Collins of Urbana is typical of the book's method — a community recipe collection printed as a household manual, so a sauce like this one arrives with a return address rather than an author.