Plain Sauce
1 cup water. 1/2 cup sugar. 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon vanilla or lemon 2 tablespoons cornstarch Mix sugar and cornstarch, add water and boil 5 minutes. Remove from fire and add butter and flavoring.
This is a cornstarch-thickened pudding sauce, the sort ladled hot over steamed puddings, cottage pudding or apple dumplings. The printed ingredient list has lost a line or two, so read the method before you shop.
- Missing quantitiesSugar and water are both called for in the method but absent from the list — a typesetting casualty. Sauces of this type in the same period generally run to about a cup each of sugar and boiling water against the 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, but the original does not say, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than the book's.
- Mix dry first, and mean itThe instruction to combine sugar and cornstarch before the water is the hinge of the recipe. The sugar granules keep the starch grains apart so they hydrate individually; tip cornstarch straight into hot water and you get lumps no whisking will fully clear.
- Five minutes is not too longModern cooks are taught to pull cornstarch off the heat the moment it thickens, which is right for a sauce thickened with a slurry at the end. Here the starch is boiled from cold, and a few minutes at a full boil is what cooks out the raw, chalky taste. It will thicken within the first minute and then look no different.
- Butter and flavouring off the fireBoth go in after the pan leaves the heat. Boiling the butter in breaks the emulsion and leaves a greasy film; boiling vanilla or lemon extract drives off most of what you paid for.
- "Lemon" means extractIn a book of this date, "vanilla or lemon" is shorthand for the bottled extracts, roughly a teaspoon. Fresh lemon juice in the same quantity gives a thinner, sharper sauce and can slacken the starch slightly; add the zest instead if you want the flavour without the acid.
- Consistency and yieldAssuming the usual proportions, this makes about a cup and a half — enough for six modest servings. It thickens further as it cools and will set to a pudding-like gel in the refrigerator; loosen it over low heat with a spoonful of water rather than reboiling.
Sauces like this one are the plain end of a family that runs from hard sauce (butter and sugar creamed cold) through foamy egg sauces to the wine and brandy sauces of Victorian holiday tables. What sets this version apart is that it uses no eggs, no cream and no spirits — just water, sugar, starch and a little butter. Cornstarch had been manufactured commercially in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century and by 1900 was a familiar pantry item, promoted by its makers as a cheap, dependable thickener that behaved the same way every time. A cook who could not count on eggs, or who was feeding a household that took no alcohol, could still put a hot sweet sauce on the table with what was in the cupboard. "Plain" here reads as a category rather than an apology.