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Lemon or Orange Sauce
Put 1 cup water into saucepan; when boiling add 2 tablespoons orange or lemon juice, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon corn starch mixed with a little cold water. Boil 5 minutes, adding 1 tablespoon caramel if dark color is desired.
A thin cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the type poured over steamed puddings, plain cake or fried dough. It comes together in under ten minutes and makes about one cup.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe is the phrase "mixed with a little cold water." Cornstarch dropped dry into boiling liquid seizes into lumps; whisk the teaspoon of starch with a tablespoon or two of cold water until smooth, then stream it in while stirring.
- Five minutes is not too longA modern cook might pull a starch sauce off the heat the moment it thickens, but a full boil is what cooks out the raw, chalky taste and turns the sauce from cloudy to translucent. Keep it at a low boil and stir so the bottom does not scorch.
- Citrus juice at the startThe acid in lemon or orange juice will gradually thin a cornstarch sauce if it is held over heat, so the sauce is best served soon after it is made. If you want a sharper citrus edge, hold back half the juice and stir it in off the heat.
- "Caramel" means colouring, not candyIn a book of this era, a tablespoon of caramel most likely means burnt-sugar colouring, sold in bottles as a browning agent; the recipe calls for it only "if dark color is desired." It is optional and contributes little beyond a faint bitterness; skip it unless you want the sauce to read brown rather than pale gold.
- Sweetness runs lowTwo tablespoons of sugar to a cup of water gives a barely sweet sauce, which suits a dish that is already sweet in itself. Taste and add sugar by the tablespoon if the dish it accompanies is plain.
- Worth addingA pinch of salt and a strip of zest, dropped in while the water boils and fished out at the end, do more for the sauce than the extra sugar. The original assumes juice only.
- Yield and servingAbout one cup, enough for four to six servings. Serve warm; with only a teaspoon of starch it stays thin, thickening a little as it cools, and can be loosened again over low heat with a spoonful of water.
Cornstarch sauces like this one can be read as thrifty relatives of the egg-and-butter pudding sauces of the nineteenth century: no eggs to curdle, no dairy to scald, and the whole thing built on water, sugar and a spoonful of starch. Their spread through American cookbooks broadly parallels the availability of commercially boxed cornstarch from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, which put a reliable, near-tasteless thickener in the pantry and let sauces be made from whatever fruit juice was to hand. The bottled "caramel" called for in the last line belonged to the same family of pantry conveniences, sold alongside gravy brownings for cooks who wanted colour without cooking sugar to the edge of burning.