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Vanilla Sauce
2 level tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 level tablespoonfuls of flour, Pinch of salt, 1 cup of boiling water, 4 level tablespoonfuls of sugar, 1 teaspoonful of vanilla.
Melt butter in saucepan, add flour and salt and mix until smooth; add slowly the boiling water, stirring and beating well. Add sugar and milk.
A plain flour-thickened dessert sauce of the sort served over steamed and baked puddings. The instructions contain one obvious printer's error worth resolving before you start.
- The final line is a misprintNo milk appears in the ingredient list, and the vanilla is never added. Read it as "add sugar and vanilla" — the sugar dissolves off the heat and the vanilla goes in last so its aroma is not driven off.
- Level tablespoonsThe recipe specifies level rather than heaping spoonfuls, a practice American cookbooks were increasingly adopting around the turn of the century. Two level tablespoons of butter is about 1 oz (28 g); two of flour is about 1/2 oz (15 g).
- Boiling water, not coldThe recipe calls for boiling water, added slowly to the butter-and-flour paste with constant stirring and beating.
- Cook the flour outLet the butter and flour bubble together for a minute before the water goes in, and simmer the finished sauce two or three minutes more. Undercooked flour gives the sauce a pasty taste that sugar will not hide.
- ConsistencyOne cup of water to two tablespoons of flour gives a pourable sauce that thickens noticeably as it cools. Thin it with a spoonful of hot water if it stiffens while the pudding is being turned out.
- YieldAbout one cup, which will stretch to several modest servings of pudding.
Butter-and-flour dessert sauces like this one were the workhorse accompaniment to the steamed and boiled puddings that dominated American and British dessert courses through the nineteenth century — cheap, made from staples on hand, and usable hot over anything from cottage pudding to apple dumplings. Vanilla extract had become a familiar grocery item in the United States by the late nineteenth century, which is why a teaspoonful can be called for here without comment. The recipe appears in a promotional cookbook issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the chocolate firm that traced its business to a mill established in 1765 and that spent the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries distributing free recipe booklets to teach American cooks what to do with cocoa and chocolate.