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Plum Pudding Sauce
1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1/2 cup crisco 1/4 cup karo sirup 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon lemon flavoring 1 pint boiling water Melt the crisco and stir into it the karo sirup. Mix the cornstarch with the sugar, and stir it into the crisco and sirup. Then stir in the boiling water. Let it boil up well, then add the vanilla and lemon flavoring.
A cornstarch-thickened sweet sauce for steamed pudding, built on shortening rather than butter. It comes together in a few minutes and needs constant stirring at one stage.
- The hinge: stir as the water goes inCornstarch dispersed in fat and syrup can still lump if boiling water hits it all at once. Add the water in a thin stream while stirring, then bring it up to a full boil so the starch loses its raw taste and reaches full thickening power.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once; the modern product is a trans-fat-free vegetable shortening. Unsalted butter gives a better-tasting sauce in the same quantity.
- Karo sirupLight corn syrup. It is here for gloss and to keep the sauce from turning grainy as it cools. Golden syrup works and adds flavor; honey will dominate.
- Lemon flavoringMeaning lemon extract, not juice. A teaspoon of extract is assertive; the finely grated zest of one lemon is a cleaner substitute if you would rather not use it.
- QuantitiesOne pint is 2 cups. The finished sauce makes roughly 3 cups, enough for eight to ten servings of pudding.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint sets up as a pourable sauce that thickens noticeably as it cools. If it stiffens too much on standing, thin it over low heat with a spoonful or two of hot water.
- ServingSend it to the table hot, in a warmed pitcher, over hot pudding. Cold, it sets to a soft paste and the fat can separate.
Plum pudding, by the late nineteenth century, almost never contained plums — the word had long since come to mean raisins and other dried fruit — and it was rarely served bare. A hot sweet sauce, hard sauce, or a foaming egg sauce came with it. What dates this particular version is its ingredient list: Crisco, introduced in 1911, and Karo, on the market from the early 1900s, are both branded industrial products, and recipes naming them by trademark spread quickly through community cookbooks and manufacturer pamphlets of the 1910s and 1920s. The result is a sauce with no butter, no eggs, and no brandy — cheap, shelf-stable in its components, and a marker of how thoroughly packaged fats and glucose syrups had entered the American home kitchen within a decade of their launch.