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Plain Sauce
1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon Five Roses flour Water (about 1 pint-boiling) Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons butter Nutmeg or lemon.
Mix sugar, flour and salt with a little water. Over this pour the pint of boiling water and let boil a few minutes. Just before removing, add the butter, then the flavouring. Wine or vinegar is sometimes added to season.
A thin, pourable pudding sauce of the plainest kind — flour, water, butter, sugar. It is the sort of thing that was ladled over steamed and boiled puddings, and the recipe assumes you know that.
- The missing sugarThe ingredient list omits sugar, but the method tells you to mix it with the flour and salt. Reckon on 1/2 to 3/4 cup of granulated sugar for a pint of sauce; less if the pudding it dresses is already sweet.
- How thick this will beOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of liquid gives a sauce barely thicker than cream — it is meant to soak into a dumpling or pudding, not sit on top. If you want it to coat a spoon, use three tablespoons.
- Pint sizeFive Roses was milled in Canada, so the pint is probably the imperial one of 20 fl oz, though the book does not say and Canadian measures of the period were not consistent. A US pint of 16 oz will give a slightly thicker, more strongly flavoured sauce, which is no bad thing.
- The slurry is the hingeMix the flour, sugar and salt to a smooth paste with a little cold water before the boiling water goes in. Add boiling water to dry flour and you get lumps that no amount of beating will fix.
- Boil it properly"Let boil a few minutes" suggests something like three to five. Raw flour tastes chalky, and the starch needs heat to thicken fully.
- Butter goes in off the heatButter at the end -- The recipe adds the two tablespoons just before the pan comes off the heat; swirl it in rather than letting it boil hard, so the sauce stays glossy instead of separating into fat and paste.
- FlavouringNutmeg means freshly grated, a good rasp of it; lemon means the zest and a squeeze of juice, added after the pan leaves the heat so the aroma survives. The wine or vinegar mentioned at the end is a tablespoon or two — sherry for a sweet sauce, cider vinegar for a sharper one to cut a heavy suet pudding.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings of pudding or dumplings. It thickens as it cools, so keep it warm over low heat and thin with a spoonful of boiling water if needed.
Sauces like this one are the workhorses of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pudding cookery: water, flour, sugar, butter and a flavouring. Milk was not always to hand, and a water-based sauce cost almost nothing, which is why household manuals of the period often carry some version of it under a name like "plain sauce," "pudding sauce" or "sweet sauce." The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour to Canadian households, and its recipes were gathered largely from the company's own customers — which accounts for the telegraphic style here, and for the sugar that never made it into the ingredient list. The suggestion of wine or vinegar points back to an older English tradition in which sweet puddings were sometimes served with something sharp to cut the suet.