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Lemon Sauce for Puddings
Put the rind and strained juice of a large lemon into a bowl. Pour over them a wine-glassful of sherry or raisin wine and a wine-glassful of water. Let them infuse some time. Mix an ounce of fresh butter and an ounce of flour over the fire. When it is slightly browned gradually pour in the wine and water; add 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, and boil gently until the mixture is quite smooth. Draw the sauce-pan from the fire, let the contents cool a minute; then add the well-beaten yolks of 2 eggs. Stir the mixture until it thickens, but it must not be allowed to boil after the eggs are added, or it will curdle. Time, four or five minutes to boil the sauce. Substitute orange for orange sauce.
A classic English roux-and-egg dessert sauce: a small blond roux loosened with wine and lemon, then enriched with yolks off the heat. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once the lemon has infused.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil. Keep it below a simmer (around 175-180F) and stir constantly; the moment it coats the back of a spoon, take it off the heat entirely.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian and Edwardian cookery books a wine-glass is about 2 fl oz, so a quarter cup each of sherry and water, half a cup of liquid in total. That is a small, concentrated sauce.
- The rindPare the zest in strips with a peeler and leave the white pith behind, or the sauce turns bitter during the infusion. Lift the strips out before the liquid goes into the roux, or strain as you pour.
- Infusing time"Some time" is left unspecified; twenty to thirty minutes at room temperature, or up to an hour, would suit. Much of the flavour comes from this step.
- Raisin wineA sweet homemade country wine, essentially obsolete. A medium or cream sherry, Madeira, or a sweet white gives the same effect; if you skip the alcohol, use water plus a little extra sugar and lemon.
- Slightly browned rouxAn ounce each of butter and flour is roughly 2 tablespoons butter to a scant quarter cup flour. Cook it only to a pale straw colour over medium heat; a darker roux muddies both the colour and the lemon.
- Adding the liquidPour the wine and water in gradually off the direct heat and whisk hard. With this little liquid the sauce goes very thick very fast, and lumps are difficult to beat out later.
- TemperingRather than dropping the yolks straight into the pan, whisk a spoonful of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture. The minute of cooling the recipe allows is barely enough on its own.
- YieldRoughly three-quarters of a cup, enough for four to six modest servings poured over a steamed or baked pudding. Serve at once; it thickens further as it stands, and reheating risks splitting.
Sauces of this kind sit at the junction of two traditions: French flour-thickened sauces enriched with egg yolks, and the older English habit of serving steamed and boiled puddings with a sweet wine sauce. Wine-and-lemon pudding sauces of this type appear in numerous late nineteenth-century household cookbooks. The instruction to swap in orange reflects how these books were used: a single set of proportions was expected to serve as a template, varied by whatever citrus, wine, or flavouring the household had to hand. Raisin wine, called for here as an alternative to sherry, was a domestic product made from dried fruit and sugar, common in nineteenth-century still-rooms and rare in kitchens thereafter.