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Brown-Sugar Sauce
1 tablespoon butter 1 1/2 tablespoons flour ¾ cup boiling water ¾ cup brown sugar Few gratings of nutmeg Cook the flour in the butter, but do not let it brown; add the water gradually; boil and stir; add the sugar; cook until melted: add the nutmeg and serve hot.
A simple flour-thickened dessert sauce, meant to be ladled hot over ice cream or a frozen pudding. It comes together in about five minutes on the stovetop.
- The quantitiesRead the flour as 1 1/2 tablespoons, and both the water and the brown sugar as 3/4 cup each. That gives a pourable sauce; less flour and it will not coat, more and it turns pasty as it cools.
- Cook the roux, brieflyMelting the butter and stirring in the flour for a minute over low heat is what removes the raw-flour taste. The instruction not to let it brown is the point: colour here would muddy a sauce whose whole flavour is brown sugar and nutmeg.
- Add water graduallyBoiling water dumped in at once will seize the roux into lumps. Pour in a few tablespoons, whisk smooth, then continue; bring to a full boil for a minute so the starch thickens completely.
- Sugar last, off the boilSugar at the end -- the recipe adds the brown sugar only after the flour and water have boiled, and asks no more than that it be cooked until melted, which takes under a minute. Prolonged boiling with the sugar in makes the sauce sticky and darker than intended.
- Brown sugarPeriod brown sugar was less uniform than today's. Light brown gives a mild caramel note; dark brown or muscovado makes a noticeably molasses-heavy sauce, which is worth choosing deliberately.
- NutmegGrate it fresh at the end, off the heat. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and will taste dusty against the sugar.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup, enough for about four servings. Serve hot, as the recipe directs; if it stands and stiffens, thin with a spoonful of hot water over low heat.
Flour-thickened sweet sauces of this kind were common in American dessert cookery through the later nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, when a cook wanted something hot, cheap and quick to dress a plain pudding. Brown sugar was the more economical, less refined choice, and its slight molasses character with a scrape of nutmeg is a pairing that recurs across the era's puddings, gingerbreads and hard sauces.