Vanilla Sauce
3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons butter 1 cup water 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix the sugar and flour together. Add the boiling water slowly, stirring constantly. Cook twenty minutes, frequently stirring. Add the butter just before taking from the stove. Cool, and add vanilla.
A flour-thickened sweet sauce for puddings, of the sort that once stood in for custard when eggs were dear or being saved for something else. It is straightforward, but two details in the wording matter.
- The water must be boilingThe recipe says "add the boiling water slowly" although the ingredient list just says water. Pour it hot onto the dry sugar-flour mixture in a steady thread, whisking, or the flour will seize into lumps that twenty minutes of cooking will not fully break up.
- Twenty minutes is not a mistakeModern sauces thickened with flour are often pulled the moment they gel, but a raw-flour taste lingers. The long, gentle cook is what removes it. Use low heat and a heavy pan; at a hard boil the sauce will reduce and turn gluey.
- Butter last, off the heat's worstAdding the butter at the end, rather than making a roux at the start, keeps it emulsified and glossy. Stir it in in pieces just as the pan comes off the burner.
- Vanilla after coolingVanilla's aromatics are volatile and alcohol-based extract loses some of its character in a hot pan, which is the likely reason the recipe holds it back until the sauce has cooled rather than mere fussiness.
- ConsistencyThree tablespoons of flour to one cup of liquid gives a thick, spoonable sauce that sets further as it cools. Thin it with a little hot water or milk if you want something pourable over a steamed pudding.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter cups, enough to sauce four to six servings of pudding, gingerbread or baked apples.
- Serving temperatureThe recipe cools the sauce to add the vanilla, but it can be gently rewarmed before serving. Whisk as it reheats and do not let it boil again.
Flour-and-water dessert sauces run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery as the plain sibling of egg custard: cheaper, more forgiving, and stable enough to sit on the back of the stove. A sauce built on flour, water, sugar and a little butter asks nothing of the egg basket. Vanilla itself had shifted from luxury to pantry staple over the preceding decades, as extraction and, from the late nineteenth century, synthetic vanillin brought the flavour within reach of ordinary kitchens; a teaspoon stirred into a cup of thickened sugar-water was the cheapest route to a dessert that tasted deliberate.