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Orange Sauce (Cup water cup orange juice cup)
1 cup water 1/2 cup orange juice 1/3 cup sugar 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 egg yolk, if desired A few grains salt Stir the cornstarch smooth with a little cold water. Heat the one cup of cold water to boiling, and stir into it the cornstarch mixture. Let it boil gently two minutes. Add the sugar and salt and the grated yellow rind of half an orange. Be careful to grate off only the very outside yellow part of the rind. If a richer sauce is desired, after thickening the water with the cornstarch stir a little of the sauce into the egg yolk and mix well, then stir the egg yolk into the sauce; then add the orange juice.
A cornstarch-thickened pudding sauce of the plain sort that filled out dessert menus before whipped cream and custard sauces became everyday. It comes together in under ten minutes and needs almost no equipment.
- Add the juice off the heatOrange juice boiled hard turns dull and faintly bitter, and prolonged boiling can slacken a cornstarch bond. Stir it in at the very end, with the pan off the burner, and serve soon after.
- Where the juice goes in the plain versionThe written method only names the moment for the juice in the enriched variation. For the plain sauce, add it last, after the sugar, salt and rind, and heat only until warmed through.
- Slurry first, alwaysCornstarch stirred smooth with cold water before it meets boiling liquid is the whole trick here. Dumped in dry it seizes into lumps that are difficult to beat out.
- Two minutes is not arbitraryCornstarch needs a brief boil to thicken fully and to cook off its raw, chalky taste. Stir gently throughout; vigorous beating after gelatinization breaks the starch structure and thins the sauce.
- Tempering the yolkThe instruction to stir a little hot sauce into the yolk before returning it to the pan is what keeps it from scrambling. The recipe says nothing further about heat, but after the yolk goes in the sauce should be kept below a simmer rather than boiled again.
- The rindOnly the coloured zest carries the oil; the white pith beneath is bitter. A microplane takes off the yellow and leaves the pith behind more reliably than a box grater.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half, enough to sauce six modest servings of steamed pudding, plain cake or baked apples.
Cornstarch sauces like this one belong to the era when commercial corn starch, sold in boxes from the mid-nineteenth century onward, gave American home cooks a cheap thickener that behaved predictably and did not require eggs or long reduction. Domestic-science cookbooks of the period leaned on them heavily: a sweet starch sauce could dress up a plain steamed or boiled pudding at almost no cost, and the optional egg yolk here is exactly the sort of graduated economy such books liked to offer -- make it plain on a Tuesday, make it rich for company. The insistence on grating only the outer yellow rind reflects a genuine point of technique rather than fussiness, since the white pith is where the bitterness lives.