Home › Pudding Sauces › Molasses Sauce
Molasses Sauce
1 cup molasses 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons lemon juice or 1 tablespoon vinegar Boil molasses and butter five minutes; remove from fire and add lemon juice. Cream Sauce I 3/4 cup thick cream 1/4 cup milk 1/3 cup powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Mix cream and milk, beat until stiff, using egg-beater; add sugar and vanilla.
A two-minute stovetop sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, of the kind that needed to be sharp enough to cut a heavy suet crust. The whole thing hinges on the acid going in off the heat.
- Add the acid last, off the heatLemon juice or vinegar boiled with molasses loses its brightness and can make the sauce sticky and dull. Take the pan off the burner before it goes in, as written.
- Molasses to useOrdinary unsulphured molasses is a safe choice. Blackstrap is much more bitter and mineral and will overwhelm the butter; treacle or a light cane syrup are closer substitutes if molasses is not to hand.
- Five minutes is a real boilMolasses foams up hard and scorches at the pan edge. Use a saucepan several times deeper than the volume of syrup, keep it at a steady simmer rather than a rolling boil, and stir.
- Butter quantity1 1/2 tablespoons is about 3/4 oz, or roughly 20 g. It is there for gloss and body rather than richness.
- ConsistencyAfter five minutes the sauce will still look thin in the pan and will thicken noticeably as it drops toward serving temperature. Test on a cold saucer if in doubt rather than boiling longer.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup, enough for six to eight servings of steamed pudding, gingerbread or a plain cottage pudding. Serve warm; it thickens considerably as it cools, and loosens again if reheated gently with a spoonful of water.
Molasses was an everyday sweetener in American kitchens well into the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and shipped north in quantity from the Caribbean, and it lasted longest in exactly this sort of role: a pudding sauce, a gingerbread, a pie filling. Cookbooks of this period commonly ran a whole section of pudding sauces, boiled and steamed puddings being a common everyday dessert. The lemon juice or vinegar looks like deliberate work rather than seasoning by habit: molasses is cloying on its own, and a sharp note keeps a plain flour or suet pudding from tasting merely sweet.