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Pudding Sauces
1 square Runkel's Chocolate, cupful milk, tablespoonfuls cornstarch, Dash salt, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Cook together the water, sugar, and cinnamon, strain, add the chocolate which has been dissolved in hot milk, thicken with cornstarch, wet in a little water. Add the salt and beat till creamy. After taking off the fire, add the vanilla and serve hot. This is a very nice sauce to use with a hot plain pudding of any kind or with vanilla ice cream frozen hard.
Foamy Sauce. cupful powdered sugar, 3 whites eggs, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1 cupful boiling water.
Beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, add the powdered sugar, flavoring, and water, stir carefully, and serve very hot.
Two sauces printed as one entry, and the typesetting has swallowed most of the numbers — the ingredient lists give no quantities for water, sugar or cinnamon at all, and several fractions have dropped out. Treat this as a record of method rather than a working formula.
- The Foamy Sauce is the problemThree raw egg whites are whipped and then merely stirred with a cup of boiling water. That much cold foam drops the water well below any pasteurising temperature, and the mixture is never returned to the heat, so the whites stay effectively raw. Salmonella risk in shell eggs is the specific issue; use a current recipe that either cooks the sauce over simmering water to 160F or calls for pasteurised whites.
- Missing quantitiesThe chocolate sauce method calls for water, sugar and cinnamon that appear nowhere in the list, and the printed "cupful milk" and "tablespoonfuls cornstarch" have lost their numbers. Any figure supplied here would be invention; the surviving proportions are not enough to reconstruct it reliably.
- Runkel's ChocolateRunkel Brothers was a New York chocolate manufacturer. Baking chocolate of the period was commonly sold in squares of roughly an ounce, so a modern 1 oz square of unsweetened chocolate is the nearest equivalent, though period chocolate was coarser in texture.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaApparently a proprietary name, as Runkel's is. Any good vanilla extract stands in; 'Mexican vanilla' indicated vanilla of Mexican origin.
- Wetting the cornstarch"Thicken with cornstarch, wet in a little water" means the modern slurry — stir the starch into cold water before it goes near the hot liquid, or it will seize into lumps. The sauce needs to come to a full boil briefly after the starch goes in, or it will taste chalky and thin again on cooling.
- Straining the spiceThe cinnamon is boiled with the water and sugar and then strained out, which points to a broken stick rather than ground. Ground cinnamon will not strain and leaves the sauce gritty.
Household Discoveries belongs to a class of turn-of-the-century American compendia in which proprietary names sit where a plainer book would simply say "chocolate" and "vanilla" — here Runkel Brothers chocolate and McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla. The sauces themselves are older than the brands. Foamy or "frothy" sauce, a meringue of whites, sugar and flavouring loosened with boiling water or wine, runs through nineteenth-century English and American cookery as the standard accompaniment to a steamed or boiled pudding, valued because it cost almost nothing beyond eggs and could be beaten up while the pudding turned out. Chocolate sauce thickened with cornstarch reflects a newer development: cheap boxed cornstarch arrived in American kitchens in the second half of the century, and the suggestion to pour the hot sauce over hard-frozen ice cream may hint at a household with reliable access to ice as well.