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Lemon Sauce
1 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon cornstarch 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon butter 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice Mix sugar, salt and cornstarch, add water gradually, stirring constantly while cooking. Boil 5 minutes. Remove from fire, add lemon juice and butter. Serve with Apple Betty.
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the kind that appears in almost every American menu book of the period. It comes together in under ten minutes and depends entirely on when the lemon and butter go in.
- Add the lemon off the heatThis is the hinge. Lemon juice boiled with the sauce turns flat and faintly bitter, and acid added early will slacken cornstarch. Pull the pan off the burner, then stir in juice and butter.
- "Remove from fire"Simply means off the heat. The wording belongs to solid-fuel ranges, where you moved the pot to a cooler part of the stove rather than turning a dial.
- Boiling 5 minutesCornstarch needs to reach a boil to lose its raw, chalky taste; a long, hard rolling boil, especially with constant stirring, can thin the sauce again. Bring it to a boil, then hold it at a gentle simmer, stirring, for the time given.
- Mix the dry ingredients firstSugar, salt and cornstarch combined dry, then wetted gradually, is the period's usual method for avoiding lumps, and it works well for a sauce this small.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of cornstarch to one cup of liquid gives a light pouring sauce, translucent and just thick enough to coat a spoon. It will set noticeably firmer as it cools; thin with a spoonful of hot water if it stiffens too much.
- Yield and servingMakes about a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings of pudding. Serve warm, not hot, over Apple Betty, cottage pudding, steamed puddings or gingerbread.
Clear cornstarch sauces like this one were a common finish for the plain steamed and baked puddings served at American family dinners from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth. Commercial cornstarch, sold in boxes from the mid-nineteenth century onward, gave cooks a cheap thickener that produced a glossy, translucent sauce without eggs or cream, and lemon was among the most common flavourings. Apple Betty, the dish this sauce is assigned to here, is a layered pudding of sliced apples and buttered crumbs; the sauce supplies the moisture and tartness a baked Betty tends to lose in the oven. Its appearance in a menu book is characteristic of the era's household planning literature, which laid out meals in advance and leaned on a handful of interchangeable sauces to dress up simple desserts.