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Vanilla Sauce, for Sweet Puddings
Boil a quarter of an inch of vanilla and a table-spoonful of sugar in a quarter of a pint of water for ten minutes. Mix a dessert-spoonful of arrowroot to a smooth paste with a spoonful of cold water. Strain the boiling syrup upon it, and stir the sauce till it is smooth. Add half a wine-glassful of brandy, and serve. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for five or six persons. Time, ten minutes to boil the sauce.
A clear, brandy-spiked arrowroot sauce for steamed and boiled puddings. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the one rule is to keep the arrowroot off the boil once it has thickened.
- Arrowroot is not cornflourArrowroot thickens to a glossy, translucent gel and then breaks down if held at a boil — the sauce turns thin and watery. Pouring the boiling syrup onto the cold slurry, as written, is exactly right; do not return the pan to the heat afterwards.
- A quarter of an inch of vanillaThat means a quarter-inch length of vanilla pod. If your pod is dry, a half-inch piece is not excessive. A few drops of extract — well under a teaspoon — will do instead, stirred in at the end rather than boiled.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml or a scant two-thirds of a US cup. Reduce it slightly over the ten minutes of boiling and you get a more concentrated syrup.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons, so about 6 g of arrowroot to 150 ml of liquid — a light, pourable sauce rather than a custard. A tablespoonful of sugar is roughly 12-15 g.
- Half a wine-glassfulA Victorian wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so this is roughly 1 fl oz or 30 ml of brandy. Added off the heat, it stays sharp and boozy; if you want it milder, add it to the syrup before straining.
- Strain itStraining catches the pod and any vanilla seeds and grit. If you would rather keep the specks, scrape the seeds into the syrup and strain out only the pod.
- Yield and servingFive or six servings means a sauce-boat's worth — about two tablespoons each, poured over a hot steamed pudding. Serve it hot; arrowroot sauces thicken as they cool and do not reheat well.
Arrowroot held a particular place in the Victorian storecupboard: it was the invalid's starch, prized because it was thought lighter and more digestible than wheat flour, and because it produced a clear rather than a cloudy sauce. Cassell's reaches for it whenever a sweet sauce should look bright on the plate. The vanilla is measured in inches because pods were sold by the pod and used very sparingly — a costly import, generally traced through Spanish trade from Mexico and by this period grown in Réunion. The "probable cost, 4d." is characteristic of the book, which priced nearly every dish so a housekeeper could budget a whole dinner in advance; fourpence for a sauce serving six says the vanilla was being stretched a long way.