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Lemon Sauce
1 lemon. 1 cup sugar. 4 tablespoons water 4 teaspoons cornstarch 1 tablespoon butter.
Boil sugar, then add cornstarch and butter, lastly the lemon, also grated rind.
Serve at once. Vinegar is sometimes added to season.
A standard cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce for steamed and baked puddings. The printed ingredient list here is incomplete, so a little reconstruction is needed before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe list gives water, cornstarch and butter but the method calls for sugar and lemon, which were dropped from the printing. Sauces of this type in the same period run roughly 1/2 to 1 cup sugar and the juice and grated rind of one lemon; treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the book's own.
- The water is too little as printedFour tablespoons of water will not carry four teaspoons of cornstarch plus sugar into a pourable sauce. Comparable sauces use about a cup of boiling water; the four tablespoons are most likely the cold water for slaking the cornstarch.
- Slake the starch first"Add cornstarch" means add it as a smooth cold-water paste, never dry into hot syrup. Dry cornstarch hitting boiling sugar sets into lumps that no amount of beating will disperse.
- Cook the starch outOnce the paste goes in, bring it back to a simmer and hold it a minute or two until the sauce turns from cloudy to glossy. Pulled off too early it tastes chalky.
- Lemon goes in last, off the heatLemon goes in last -- Acid can weaken a cornstarch gel, especially if the sauce is boiled hard after the juice goes in, so follow the recipe's order: cornstarch and butter first, juice and rind stirred in at the end, and no further hard boiling.
- Zest, not pith"Grated rind" means the coloured outer layer only. Modern lemons are usually waxed; scrub in hot water before grating.
- The vinegar noteThe book offers vinegar simply as a seasoning, "sometimes added"; a spoonful sharpens a sauce and may also have served where lemons were scarce, though the recipe does not say so.
- Yield and servingServing -- "Serve at once" matters: the sauce thickens further and skins over as it cools, so keep it warm over hot water if it must wait. Yield depends entirely on how much liquid and sugar you reconstruct.
Cornstarch pudding sauces belong to the era when commercial corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in North American kitchens. Lemon sauce in particular was the standard partner to steamed puddings, gingerbread and plain cottage pudding, since a bright acid cut through the heaviness of a suet or molasses batter. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book is typical of milling-company cookbooks, which were compiled from recipes sent in by customers and distributed to sell flour. The alternative of vinegar for lemon suggests that in much of rural Canada citrus may have been a purchased luxury rather than something the cellar supplied.