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Gin Sauce
Put four lumps of sugar and a quarter of a pint of water into a small saucepan, and let them boil together for five minutes. Mix half a tea-spoonful of arrowroot with the juice of half a lemon, and add this, along with a quarter of a pint of gin, to the sugar and water. Bring again to the boil, simmer for two or three minutes until slightly thickened; strain into a very hot sauce-boat, and serve. Probable cost, 9d.
A Victorian spirit sauce for hot puddings, thickened with arrowroot rather than butter or egg. It comes together in under ten minutes, and the only real skill is knowing when to stop cooking it.
- The hinge: arrowrootArrowroot thickens at just below boiling and loses body if held at a hard boil. The recipe allows two or three minutes' simmering; keep the heat gentle and take the pan off as soon as it thickens, since prolonged boiling will slacken it again.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. So roughly 140 ml water and 140 ml gin, giving a little under 300 ml of finished sauce after the initial boiling.
- Lumps of sugarLump sizes varied, being cut from a loaf, so treat four lumps as a rough 12-15 g, three or four teaspoons. This is a lightly sweetened sauce, not a syrup; taste and add more if it is going over a plain steamed pudding.
- The ginLondon dry gin is the obvious choice, but much Victorian gin was sweetened in the Old Tom style. If you use an Old Tom, cut the sugar back.
- Alcohol stays inA brief simmer drives off some of the alcohol but by no means all of it. With equal quantities of gin and water this remains an alcoholic sauce — worth knowing before serving it to children.
- StrainingThe straining step catches any lumps of unhydrated arrowroot. Slaking the arrowroot smoothly in the lemon juice first makes it largely unnecessary, but the sauce should still go through a fine sieve if there is any doubt.
- Serve very hotA spirit sauce goes dull and slightly gluey as it cools, and arrowroot sauces do not reheat well. Warm the sauce-boat, as instructed, and make it while the pudding is turning out.
- YieldA little under 300 ml, enough for four to six servings over a steamed or baked pudding.
- Probable cost, 9d.Cassell's gives a probable cost in pre-decimal pence for most of its recipes, for the household budget. Ninepence was a real outlay for a sauce, most of it the gin.
Hot spirit sauces were a standard finish for boiled and steamed puddings in Victorian Britain — brandy sauce for Christmas pudding, rum sauce for something plainer, and gin where gin was what the house had. Sauces of this type share a common frame: sugar syrup, a starch thickener and an acid, with only the bottle changed. Arrowroot was preferred to flour here because it sets clear rather than cloudy and carries no raw-cereal taste, qualities that also made it a fixture of the Victorian invalid kitchen. The recipe is a small window on how spirits functioned in the period's cooking: not only as a luxury flourish but as an everyday flavouring, priced out to the penny alongside the sugar and the lemon.