Home › Cookery › Molasses Sauce
Molasses Sauce
Moderately boil a pint of molasses from five to twenty minutes, according to its consistency. Add three eggs well beaten. Stir them and continue to boil a few minutes longer. Season with nutmeg and lemon.-Mrs. Dr. J.
A pudding sauce of the plainest sort: molasses cooked down, then thickened with egg. The whole dish turns on how you add the eggs.
- Temper the eggsBeaten eggs dropped straight into boiling molasses will scramble. Whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot molasses into the eggs first, then return the mixture to the pan off the heat before setting it back over low heat.
- "A pint of molasses"Two cups, measured by volume. Use unsulphured cooking molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than the molasses a Virginia kitchen of the 1870s would most likely have used for a dessert sauce, and will overwhelm the nutmeg.
- "Moderately boil ... five to twenty minutes"The range is real, not vagueness: thin molasses needs reducing, thick molasses barely any. Cook until it coats a spoon and no longer runs off in a thin stream.
- After the eggs go in"A few minutes longer" at a bare simmer is enough, and constant stirring is required. Once it thickens visibly, take it off. Held at a rolling boil it will curdle.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe original gives none. A quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg and the zest plus juice of half a lemon suits two cups of sauce; add the lemon juice at the end, since acid encourages the egg to seize.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for eight servings. It is a hot sauce for steamed or boiled puddings, batter pudding and gingerbread; it thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a little hot water.
- StrainingIf the egg breaks into threads despite tempering, pass the sauce through a fine sieve. It will taste right even when the texture has gone slightly grainy.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener in American households for most of the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and shipped up in barrels from the West Indies among other sources; a sauce built on it rather than on butter and sugar is a frugal one, and its presence in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) alongside richer wine and hard sauces shows the range of a book compiled from many contributors' notebooks. Marion Cabell Tyree gathered the recipes from Virginia housekeepers and credited them variously, sometimes by fuller name and sometimes, as here, by initials alone "Mrs. Dr. J." Egg-thickened dessert sauces of this kind descend from the same family as English custard sauce, and nutmeg and lemon were common seasonings for sauces served over a boiled pudding.