Golden Sauce
1 pound of sugar. 2 ounces of corn starch. 1 quart of water. 4 ounces of best fresh butter. 3 yolks of eggs. 1 nutmeg.
Break the nutmeg in pieces and boil it in the quart of water. Mix starch and sugar together dry and stir them in. When cooked beat in the butter; beat the yolks with a spoonful of sauce and add them with rapid beating to the sauce, which should be immediately taken from the fire and not allowed to boil the yolks. Strain for use.
A boiled cornstarch pudding sauce enriched with butter and yolks — the sort of thing ladled hot over steamed puddings, boiled batter puddings and plain cake. It works as written, but the proportions are for a bakery, and two steps decide whether it comes out glossy or grainy.
- The hinge: the yolksOnce the yolks go in, the pan must be off the heat. Temper them with a spoonful of the hot sauce first, as directed, beat them in fast, and stop. Boiling after the yolks are added will curdle them into threads; the straining at the end will catch any that form, along with the spent nutmeg pieces.
- Scale it downAs written this is roughly five cups of sauce — a pound of sugar to a quart of water. For a household pudding, quarter it: 4 oz (½ cup plus 2 tbsp) sugar, ½ oz (2 tbsp) cornstarch, 1 cup water, 1 oz butter, 1 yolk, and a few gratings of nutmeg.
- Whole nutmegBoiling a cracked nutmeg in the water is an infusion, not a seasoning — it gives a mild, rounded flavour with no gritty specks, and the pieces come out at the straining. A whole nutmeg to a quart is assertive; if substituting ground, start with ½ teaspoon and taste.
- Mix starch and sugar dryThis is not a fussy detail. The sugar keeps the cornstarch grains apart so they hydrate individually instead of seizing into lumps when they hit the boiling nutmeg water. Stir the dry mixture in steadily and keep whisking until it thickens and clears, a minute or two at a simmer.
- Cook the starch outCornstarch needs to reach a full boil and hold it briefly, or the sauce tastes chalky and thins on standing. Do this before the yolks go in — it is the only chance you get.
- "Best fresh butter"In this period the phrase meant unsalted butter that had not gone rancid, which was a real concern before reliable refrigeration. Use unsalted butter, cold and cut in pieces, beaten in off the boil for the best gloss.
- Serving and keepingServe hot. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened over low heat with a little water or milk, though the yolks mean it should not be brought back to a boil. Keep leftovers refrigerated and use within two days.
Sweet cornstarch sauces like this belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when commercially milled cornstarch became cheap and ubiquitous in American kitchens — it was already widely available from the 1850s and 1860s — and, by most accounts, began displacing arrowroot, flour and long-cooked egg custards as the standard thickener for pudding sauces. "Golden sauce" is a descriptive name rather than a fixed formula — the colour comes from the yolks and butter — and it sits in the same family as the hard sauces, foaming sauces and lemon sauces that a working pastry cook kept on hand to dress otherwise plain boiled and steamed puddings. The nutmeg is the older element: infusing a broken whole nutmeg in the liquid is a technique inherited from English pudding cookery, where nutmeg is often said to have been the default sweet spice long before vanilla extract was affordable. That this recipe is written for a quart of water at a time is a reminder of its setting; The American Pastry Cook appears to have been addressed to men working in hotel and bakery kitchens rather than to households.