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LEMON SAUCE FOR PUDDINGS (another way)
Put the thin rind of a lemon and three table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar into a saucepan with half a pint of water. Simmer gently for twenty minutes, then add the juice of the lemon and a wine-glassful of gin. Strain and serve. Two or three drops of cochineal may be added, if liked. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A thin pouring sauce rather than a thickened one — closer to a warm lemon cordial than to the cornflour-bound lemon sauces of later books. Everything hinges on keeping the pith out and the gin uncooked.
- Thin rind means no pithPare the lemon with a swivel peeler or a sharp knife so you lift only the yellow zest. Any white pith held at a simmer for twenty minutes will turn the sauce bitter, and there is no fat or starch here to mask it.
- Half a pintThis is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 285 ml — roughly 1¼ US cups. Some reduction should be expected over the twenty minutes, though how much depends on the pan and whether it is covered.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is usually reckoned at about 2 to 2½ fl oz (60–70 ml), not the capacity of a modern wine glass. Four ounces of gin in this quantity of sauce would overwhelm it.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century "powdered" sugar is granulated sugar ground fine, not the modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornflour. Use caster or ordinary granulated; three tablespoons is about 40 g.
- Add the spirit off the heatThe gin goes in after the simmering, and it should stay that way. Boiling it drives off the alcohol and the juniper aromatics that are the whole point of the addition, leaving a flat sugar syrup.
- CochinealThe Victorian colouring made from dried scale insects, sold as a red liquid. It is still available as carmine or E120, and the recipe treats it as optional, so it can simply be left out and the sauce kept its natural pale yellow. It contributes nothing but colour.
- Consistency and servingThe result is a thin pouring sauce, not a custard; there is no thickener here. It suits steamed sponge, batter and suet puddings, where a thin hot sauce soaks in; serve it hot, straight from straining. The original gives four to five servings, which works out at something over 2 fl oz each.
The title marks this as 'another way', so Cassell's carries more than one lemon sauce, and this one belongs to the older family of spirit-laced sweet sauces rather than the cornflour-thickened pudding sauces that came to dominate later British cookery. Gin was the cheap domestic spirit of the period, and brandy appears in the same role in grander households; the book quotes a probable cost of threepence. The juniper in gin sits naturally against lemon, a pairing that survives in punches and shrubs long after this sort of hot pudding sauce fell out of use. Cochineal, offered here as an optional flourish, was a common red colouring of the Victorian store cupboard, used in sweet dishes of many kinds.