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Curacoa Sauce
Mix a dessert-spoonful of arrowroot very smoothly with a little cold water, and pour upon it half a pint of boiling water. Put it on the fire, and let it boil for three or four minutes; sweeten it, and flavour it with a wineglassful of curacoa. Probable cost, 2d., exclusive of the curacoa. Sufficient for a small pudding.
A Victorian sweet pudding sauce, thickened with arrowroot rather than flour so it stays clear and glossy. Almost everything hinges on how long it spends on the heat.
- Do not overboil the arrowrootArrowroot reaches full thickness the moment it clears, and prolonged boiling breaks the starch down again into a thin, watery sauce. Thirty seconds to a minute after it turns translucent is plenty; the original's "three or four minutes" is longer than modern practice supports.
- Dessert-spoonfulA Victorian dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: roughly 2 teaspoons, or about 8-10 ml. That gives a lightly bodied pouring sauce rather than a thick one.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml or 1 1/4 US cups. Using a US half-pint of 8 fl oz will give a noticeably thicker sauce.
- WineglassfulIn nineteenth-century English cookery books a wineglass is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz (60 ml). That is a generous hit of liqueur in 10 fl oz of sauce; start with half and taste.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. Around 2 tablespoons of caster sugar suits most palates, stirred in off the heat, but curaçao is already sweet, so add the liqueur first and adjust sugar afterwards.
- CuraçaoAny orange liqueur of the curaçao family works, including triple sec and Grand Marnier, though the older orange curaçaos are closer in character. The alcohol is added off the boil and is not cooked off, so this is not a sauce for children.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for four to six servings of a steamed or baked pudding. Serve hot; arrowroot sauces thin slightly as they stand and will need a stir and a gentle rewarming, not a second boil.
Curaçao takes its name from the Caribbean island, where bitter oranges descended from Spanish plantings grew into the laraha, whose dried peel gives the liqueur its flavour; Dutch producers on and around the island are generally credited with turning that peel into a commercial cordial. By the time this recipe was written down, orange curaçao was a standard bottle in a well-stocked English sideboard, and cooks used a wineglass of it much as they used sherry or brandy, to lift an otherwise plain starch-thickened sauce. Arrowroot itself was a colonial import too, valued because it thickened clear rather than cloudy and was thought gentler on the digestion than wheat flour, which is why it turns up so often in invalid cookery and in sauces meant to be poured over a pale steamed pudding. The costing of tuppence, with the liqueur carefully excluded, tells you where the real expense lay.