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Brown Sugar Sauce (T baking powder Few grains)
2 t baking powder Few grains salt Any desired flavoring to suit fruit Bake and serve with the following sauce: 1½ C brown sugar 1 heaping T flour 1 C boiling water Brown Sugar Sauce 2 2½ T Vinegar 2 T butter Mix sugar and flour, add water, and cook until clear and thoroughly done. Remove from fire and add vinegar and butter. Serve hot on hot pudding.
The page as printed runs two recipes together: the first line and a half are the tail end of a fruit pudding batter, and the sauce proper begins at "1½ C brown sugar." Everything you need for the sauce is there, though the ingredient list is scrambled by the column break.
- Reading the abbreviationsIn this book C is cup, T is tablespoon, and t is teaspoon. The sauce is 1½ cups brown sugar, 1 heaping tablespoon flour, 1 cup boiling water, 2 tablespoons butter, and vinegar — the vinegar line as printed ("2 2½ T Vinegar") is garbled, and is best read as about 2 to 2½ tablespoons.
- The stray first linesThe 2 teaspoons baking powder, few grains salt and "any desired flavoring to suit fruit" belong to a pudding recipe that ended above; they are not part of the sauce. Ignore them unless you are reconstructing the pudding, in which case the flour, fat, sugar and liquid quantities are missing from this page entirely.
- "Cook until clear"This is the hinge. A flour-thickened sauce tastes pasty until the starch has fully gelatinised and the cloudiness gives way to translucence — the recipe gives no time, so cook at a low boil, stirring, until it is genuinely clear. Pulling it early is the usual failure.
- Mixing order mattersRub the flour into the dry brown sugar before any liquid goes in. The sugar crystals keep the flour particles apart and prevent lumps, which is likely why the original says "mix sugar and flour, add water."
- Vinegar and butter off the heatBoth go in after the pan leaves the burner. Boiling would drive off some of the vinegar's sharpness, and butter stirred into an off-heat sauce stays emulsified and glossy rather than breaking into oil.
- Which vinegar, which sugarPlain cider vinegar suits this. Use light or dark brown sugar as you like — dark gives a distinctly molasses-forward sauce that can overwhelm a delicate fruit pudding.
- Consistency and yieldOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of water gives a pourable sauce, not a pudding-thick one; it will set up further as it cools. The recipe gives no yield; from these quantities expect nearer two cups than one and a half.
- ServingServe hot on hot pudding, as directed. Reheat gently if it has stood, adding a spoonful of water to loosen it, and do not boil it again after the butter is in.
Sweet, tart, flour-thickened pudding sauces like this one were the workhorses of American dessert tables from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, when a steamed or baked pudding was cheaper to produce than a cake and a hot sauce did the job of both frosting and custard. The vinegar is the interesting part: a small acid addition brightens brown sugar and keeps it from tasting flat or cloying, the same reasoning behind the lemon juice in a lemon sauce, but using something every household already kept in quantity. Compilations of this kind are where such kitchen economies survive in print — here with the run-together ingredient list and the pudding whose top half went missing at the column break.