Apple Sauce
½ cup cold water few grains cinnamon 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon arrowroot few grains salt grated rind of 1/2 lemon Cook all together ten minutes. Strain, add more lemon juice if needed.
As printed, this is a clear lemon-arrowroot sauce rather than a purée of apples — there are no apples and no sugar in the ingredient list. Read it as a sauce to pour over an apple dessert, and note the gaps before you start.
- The missing apples and sugarNothing in the list is an apple, and nothing sweetens it. Clear lemon sauces of this kind were normally sweetened, often on the order of a quarter-cup of sugar to half a cup of water; without sugar the result is a sour, starchy glaze. If you want the sauce the title implies, expect to add sugar to taste and to serve it over baked or stewed apples.
- "Few grains"A period way of saying a pinch — less than ⅛ teaspoon. Applies to both the cinnamon and the salt.
- Arrowroot behaviourArrowroot thickens at a low temperature, somewhere around 160-170F by most accounts, and thins again if held at a hard boil. Ten minutes of real boiling will break it down and leave the sauce slack. Slurry the tablespoon of arrowroot in a little of the cold water, bring the rest to a bare simmer, stir the slurry in, and cook only until it clears and thickens — a minute or two.
- Lemon lastAcid also weakens starch gels. The tablespoon of juice in the pot is manageable, but any extra juice added at the end should go in off the heat, as the recipe implies.
- StrainingThe strain is there to remove the grated rind, which has given up its oil during cooking. Do it while the sauce is hot; arrowroot sauces set to a soft jelly as they cool and will not pass a sieve cleanly once cold.
- YieldAbout half a cup — enough to sauce two to four servings of a baked apple pudding or dumpling. It is best used the day it is made, since arrowroot weeps on standing and does not reheat well.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the long line of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks that circulated in American kitchens in the first decade of the twentieth century — books that sold a product while teaching a whole domestic curriculum around it. Arrowroot, the starch of the West Indian Maranta arundinacea, was prized in that era precisely because it thickens to a clear, glossy sauce rather than the opaque one cornstarch gives, and because it was regarded as gentle enough for invalid and nursery cookery. Entries this compressed were normal in the genre.