Lemon Sauce
Two tablespoons of butter One-half cup of sugar One tablespoon of Larkin Corn Starch Juice of one-half lemon One cup of boiling water One-half teaspoon of Larkin Lemon Flavoring Extract Beat thoroughly the butter, sugar, Corn Starch and eggs. Pour water over them and cook in a double boiler.
A simple stirred pudding sauce for gingerbread, steamed puddings or plain cake. The ingredient list and the method do not agree, which is the first thing to settle.
- The missing eggsThe method says to beat in eggs, but none appear in the list. One egg, or two yolks, gives the right body for this quantity; leave them out entirely and you still get a workable cornstarch-thickened sauce, just thinner and less rich.
- Larkin productsLarkin Co. of Buffalo sold groceries by mail alongside its soap, and the branded names are simply advertising. Use any cornstarch and any lemon extract.
- Order of operationsCream the butter and sugar, work in the cornstarch so no dry lumps remain, then the egg, then pour on the boiling water in a thin stream while whisking. Tipping the water in all at once can curdle the egg.
- Double boiler timingExpect roughly 8 to 10 minutes of steady stirring to thicken and lose the raw starch taste. Cornstarch needs to get close to boiling to set properly, so keep the water beneath it hot enough to do that and do not pull the sauce as soon as it coats the spoon.
- Lemon at the endStir in the juice and the extract off the heat. Acid weakens cornstarch gel, and alcohol-based extract loses its aroma to prolonged heat.
- Juice of half a lemonRoughly a tablespoon and a half from a supermarket lemon. Taste before adding all of it.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half, enough for six modest servings of pudding or cake. It thickens further as it cools; thin with a spoonful of hot water if needed.
Good Things to Eat belongs to a genre of premium cookbook issued by companies that sold household goods by mail — Larkin Co. of Buffalo built its business shipping soap and groceries direct to customers, and recipes that named its cornstarch and flavoring extracts did double duty as cooking instruction and catalog. Sweet pudding sauces like this one were near-obligatory in American cookery of the period, since the standard desserts of the era were steamed, boiled or baked puddings, cottage puddings and gingerbreads, all of them plain and all of them expected to arrive under something warm and glossy. Cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century, made such a sauce cheap and nearly foolproof compared with an egg-thickened custard, which is likely why the eggs here read as optional enough to fall out of the ingredient list altogether.