Lemon Sauce
1 pint boiling water 1 cup sugar 1 lemon--juice and rind 3 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons butter Braid the flour with cold water, and add to the boiling water. Cook twenty minutes in a double boiler. Cream the butter and sugar, and add the lemon juice. Pour the hot liquid over this, stir, and cool.
A sweet lemon pudding sauce of the flour-thickened type, which was the standard dessert sauce in American households before cornstarch took over. A few points in the original need translating.
- "Braid the flour"Almost certainly a misprint for blend. Stir the 3 tablespoons flour with a few tablespoons cold water into a lump-free slurry, then whisk it into the pint (2 cups) of boiling water.
- The double boiler and the twenty minutesTwenty minutes over water sounds long, but flour-thickened sauces need it: the starch has to swell fully and the raw-flour taste has to cook out. Over direct heat the same sauce would scorch or need constant attention, which is why the double boiler is specified. Whisk once or twice during the cooking.
- The rind is listed but never usedThe ingredient line calls for juice and rind; the method mentions only juice. Grate the zest of the lemon and cream it with the butter and sugar, where its oils will dissolve. Do not add the white pith.
- Add the acid late, and off the heatLemon juice thins flour-thickened sauces if it boils with them. The recipe's order, pouring the hot base over the creamed butter, sugar and juice, keeps the acid out of the cooking. Keep it that way and do not return the sauce to the heat afterward.
- SugarOne cup to a pint of water is a frankly sweet sauce by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup gives a sauce that still reads as sweet against an unsweetened steamed pudding or plain cake.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly 2 1/2 cups, enough for eight to ten servings. Meant to be spooned over cottage pudding, steamed puddings, gingerbread or plain baked apples. It was served cool or barely warm; it will thicken further as it stands, and a spoonful of hot water will loosen it.
Flour-and-water dessert sauces like this one belong to a long tradition of "pudding sauces" that stretched a little butter, sugar and one lemon into enough sweetness for a whole table. The technique is the same used for savory white sauce, simply sweetened and acidulated. Vegetarian and reform-diet cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them produced within Seventh-day Adventist and health-reform circles, needed a repertoire of sauces that leaned on butter and eggs rather than meat stock or suet.