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Sauce Doree, Golden Sauce, or Butter Sauce
1 pound of white sugar. 2 ounces of corn starch. 1 quart of water. 4 ounces of best fresh butter. 2 or 3 yolks of eggs. Nutmeg extract to flavor. Boil the water in a bright saucepan. Mix the starch in the sugar dry, and rapidly stir them in. When it has boiled up, beat in the butter. Pour a little sauce to the yolks in a cup; beat, then mix all together. Just before it begins to boil remove it from the fire, taking care the yolks do not curdle with too much cooking.
A sweetened cornstarch sauce enriched with butter and yolks — the pastry cook's all-purpose "golden sauce" for steamed and boiled puddings. It makes a large amount by modern standards and is sweeter than most palates now expect.
- The hinge: temper, then stop short of a boilWhisk a ladle of the hot starch base into the yolks before returning them to the pan, and pull it off the heat as the recipe directs, just before it comes back to a boil. Yolks cooked at a full boil can scramble into visible flecks that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- YieldA quart of water plus a pound of sugar gives roughly five cups of finished sauce, enough for 12 to 16 portions of pudding. Halving the recipe works without adjustment; smaller reductions are awkward because of the yolk count.
- SweetnessA pound of sugar to a quart of water is about 2 1/4 cups, and the result is frankly candy-sweet — appropriate to a plain suet or bread pudding, overwhelming on anything already sugared. Two-thirds of the sugar is closer to modern taste and does not affect the set.
- "A bright saucepan"Nineteenth-century kitchens ran on copper and tinned iron, and a dull or scorched pan discolored a pale sauce. Any modern stainless or enameled pan does the job; avoid bare aluminum, which can gray a yolk-thickened sauce.
- Mixing starch with the sugarThis is the whole trick for a lump-free sauce and still the best method — the sugar granules keep the cornstarch particles apart so they hydrate individually. Add the dry mixture to boiling water in a steady stream while stirring hard.
- Nutmeg extractSold in the period as a flavoring oil in alcohol and now hard to find. About 1/2 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg, or a teaspoon of vanilla with a grating of nutmeg, is a reasonable stand-in.
- Butter"Best fresh" meant unsalted and unrancid, which was not a given in period dairying. Use unsalted butter and beat it in off the direct heat so it emulsifies rather than pooling.
- Holding and reheatingThe sauce thickens further as it cools and skins over; cover the surface directly if it must wait. Reheat gently over low heat or in a bowl set over hot water, since a second boil will both thin the starch and curdle the yolks.
Sauce dorée — literally "gilded sauce" — belongs to a family of sweet pudding sauces that fill a substantial section of many American pastry manuals from the later nineteenth century, when steamed and boiled puddings were a common close to a hotel or boardinghouse dinner. The sauce is essentially a cornstarch-thickened cousin of a proper custard: cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century, let a cook produce a stable, glossy sauce in quantity with only two or three yolks, where a true crème anglaise for five cups would have taken far more and risked curdling over a coal range. The gold color and the name plainly refer to the yolks and butter, and nutmeg is a common period flavoring for pudding sauces, in line with an older English tradition of spicing sweet dishes with nutmeg and mace.