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Sauce to Serve with Dumplings
1½ cups water ½ cup sugar 1 teaspoon (large) cornstarch Juice of 1 lemon 1 tablespoon butter.
Let come to a boil, and thicken with the cornstarch.
A plain boiled sweet sauce of the kind poured over steamed or boiled dumplings. The method is compressed to a single line, so the order of operations is worth spelling out.
- Slurry the cornstarchWhisking dry cornstarch into hot liquid gives lumps. Mix the teaspoon of cornstarch with a tablespoon or two of the cold water first, bring the rest to a boil with the sugar, then stir the slurry in and let it bubble a full minute so the starch loses its raw taste.
- "Teaspoon (large)" Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spoon measures were not standardised, and "large" here probably signals a generous rather than levelled spoon. Either way the quantity is small, which points to a pourable sauce rather than a pudding-thick one.
- Add lemon and butter off the heatBoiling acid with starch for any length of time can thin the gel, so it is safer to stir in the lemon juice and the tablespoon of butter once the sauce has thickened and come off the burner. The butter also stays glossy rather than separating.
- Sweetness balanceHalf a cup of sugar to 1½ cups water is a light syrup; with the juice of one lemon it lands quite tart. Taste before serving, since lemons vary a great deal in size and acidity.
- YieldSomething over 1½ cups once the sugar, juice and butter are added, less whatever boils away. It thickens noticeably as it cools, so serve hot or thin with a splash of boiling water.
- KeepingCornstarch sauces weep and go watery on standing and do not reheat well after a day in the refrigerator. Make it while the dumplings steam.
Five Roses, a Canadian milling brand, compiled its cook book from recipes contributed by users of its flour, which is one reason entries like this one are telegraphic: the contributor assumed a reader knew what a dumpling sauce was for. Boiled and steamed suet and baking-powder dumplings were common cheap desserts in Canadian and British kitchens, and thin sweet sauces -- lemon, vanilla or brown sugar -- were a usual accompaniment. Cornstarch, sold in North America from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, made such a sauce possible without eggs.