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Arrowroot Sauce, Clear
Rub the thin rind of a lemon on large lumps of sugar, and put them in a saucepan with a breakfast-cupful of raisin or gooseberry wine. Mix a heaped tea-spoonful of arrowroot with a little water, stir it gradually into the wine, and pour it round the pudding. Time to boil, ten minutes. Sufficient for four or five persons. Probable cost, 6d.
A clear wine sauce for boiled and steamed puddings, thickened with arrowroot rather than flour so it stays translucent. The instructions assume you know how much sugar you want, and they assume a homemade fruit wine no longer sold.
- The hinge: do not boil it for ten minutesArrowroot sets almost instantly and then breaks down, thinning and losing its gloss if held at a boil. Bring the wine barely to a simmer, stir in the slaked arrowroot, cook one to two minutes until it clears and coats the spoon, and take it off the heat. The original's stated ten minutes may be intended to cover heating the wine and sugar as well as the thickening.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz, or about 1 to 1¼ cups. A heaped teaspoon of arrowroot will thicken that to a light pouring sauce, not a coating one.
- Sugar is left to your judgementNo quantity is given, so the amount is yours to set; the lumps serve both to sweeten and to take up the lemon oil. Two or three tablespoons for a cupful of sweet wine is a reasonable starting point; taste, since fruit wines vary enormously in sweetness.
- Rubbing the rind on lumpsDragging a lump of hard sugar across the lemon until it turns yellow strips the oil from the zest without any bitter pith. Sugar cubes will do in place of loaf sugar, or the same effect comes from rubbing fine zest into granulated sugar with your fingers and letting it stand ten minutes.
- Raisin or gooseberry wineBoth were standard homemade country wines in Victorian households and are effectively unavailable now. A light, sweet white — Muscat, a young Riesling, or a sweet sherry cut with water — stands in for either. Non-alcoholic versions can use white grape juice with a squeeze of lemon.
- Why arrowroot and not cornflourArrowroot sets clear and slightly glassy; cornstarch would set opaque and taste starchy, which defeats the point of a sauce called clear. Slake it in cold water first and stir it in as a thin cream, or it will lump.
- Yield and servingEnough for four or five, poured round rather than over a boiled or steamed pudding so the sauce pools and stays glossy. Serve at once: arrowroot sauces thin on standing and turn slack if reheated.
Arrowroot reached British kitchens as a colonial import — the starch of Maranta arundinacea, ground in the West Indies and shipped as a fine white powder — and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had two reputations: as an invalid food, easy on the stomach, and as the thickener of choice for anything that needed to look transparent. The method is more technique than dish: the same procedure produces a wine sauce, a fruit sauce, or a plain sweet one, depending only on the liquid. The wines specified point to a domestic economy now largely gone, in which raisin and gooseberry wine were made at home and used in the kitchen as well as in the glass.