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Cornstarch Sauce No. 1
2 cups boiling water ¾ cup sugar Butter size of walnut 2 heaping teaspoons cornstarch Pinch of salt.
Like many entries in the Five Roses book, this one lists quantities and trusts the cook to know the rest. The method is the standard one for a cornstarch-thickened sauce, and getting it right is mostly a matter of how the starch meets the water.
- Butter size of walnutRoughly 1 tablespoon of butter. Cookbooks of the period often gave butter by comparison to an egg, a walnut or a hazelnut, though the equivalents were never fixed; a walnut is usually taken as somewhere between 1 and 1½ tablespoons.
- Slurry the starch firstThe hinge of the whole thing. Two heaping teaspoons of cornstarch dropped into boiling water will lump instantly. Mix it with the sugar and a few tablespoons of cold water to a smooth cream, then stir that into the boiling water.
- Heaping teaspoonsA heaping teaspoon is roughly double a level one, so figure about 4 level teaspoons total. That gives a pourable sauce, not a pudding; add a third heaping spoon if you want it to coat a spoon heavily.
- Cook it outOnce it has come to the boil and thickened, keep it bubbling gently for two or three minutes, stirring. Cornstarch can taste raw and chalky if pulled the moment it clears, and it needs to reach boiling point to thicken properly.
- Butter lastStir the butter in off the heat, once the sauce has thickened. Added early it does nothing useful; added at the end it gives gloss and body.
- FlavouringThe recipe leaves it plain, as a base. A teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, a strip of lemon rind steeped in the water, or a tablespoon of brandy or sherry are all period-appropriate and all go in after the pan leaves the stove.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough for eight servings of steamed pudding, cottage pudding or apple dumplings. It thickens further as it cools, so serve it warm or slacken it with a little hot water.
Cornstarch sauces filled a specific gap in the early twentieth-century kitchen: they were the cheap alternative to a custard, needing neither eggs nor milk. Cornstarch had been manufactured commercially in North America since the middle of the nineteenth century and was a common grocery item by the time this book circulated, which made a sweet white sauce possible in any household with sugar, water and a box of starch. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and it carries a run of pudding sauces to go with the steamed, boiled and baked puddings elsewhere in the volume. The numbering, "No. 1," suggests a formula to be varied rather than a dish with a name.