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Transparent Sauce
2 pounds of granulated sugar, 1 pint of water. 4 ounces of fresh butter. 1/2 a lemon. 1 tablespoonful of whole spices--consisting of blades of mace, cloves, stick cinnamon and alspice.
Boil all together ten minutes--the lemon cut in pieces--then strain through a fine strainer. The juice of the lemon is essential to brighten the color of the sauce.
A spiced sugar syrup enriched with butter, meant to be poured hot over steamed and boiled puddings. It is simple, but the ten-minute boil is doing real work and the proportions are professional-scale.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of sugar to a pint of water yields roughly a quart of finished sauce, enough for twenty or more servings. Halving or quartering the recipe works without adjustment, though a small batch reduces faster, so watch the pot rather than the clock.
- Measure the sugar by weightTwo pounds of granulated sugar is about 4 1/2 cups; a pint of water is 16 fluid ounces. The syrup depends on the ratio, so weigh the sugar if you can.
- What ten minutes of boiling doesA steady boil at this ratio concentrates the syrup enough to give the sauce body once it cools. Boil it much longer and it thickens toward a candy consistency on the plate; stop short and it runs thin. The recipe gives no temperature or test, so judge it by feel.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in dried curls called blades. If you cannot find whole blades, a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace added to the pot and strained out through cloth is a reasonable substitute; whole spices, though, are the reason this strains clear.
- Cut the lemon, do not just juice itThe half lemon goes in cut up, peel and all, so the oil in the zest infuses along with the acid. The acid is not only for color: it inverts some of the sugar during the boil and keeps the sauce from crystallizing as it stands.
- The butterFour ounces is one stick. It will not stay emulsified in a syrup this sweet, so expect a film on top; whisk the sauce briefly just before serving, or add the butter off the heat in pieces for a briefly smoother finish.
- StrainingStrain while hot through a fine sieve, and through a doubled cheesecloth if you want the transparency the name promises. Spice fragments and any lemon pulp are what cloud it.
- Serving and keepingServe hot over steamed puddings, plum pudding, cottage pudding or baked apple dumplings. The high sugar content helps it keep for some days refrigerated, and it reheats gently; the butter will resolidify at the top and needs stirring back in.
Nineteenth-century American pastry work divided pudding sauces into two broad families: the opaque ones, thickened with butter, egg or cream, and the clear ones built on boiled sugar syrup. This is squarely in the second camp, and the name simply describes the look of it, a syrup clear enough to read through, in contrast to creamy sauces such as hard sauce or foam sauce. A cooked syrup of this sort holds up over a stretch of service far better than an egg-thickened sauce, which is part of its appeal for feeding numbers. The spice combination of mace, cloves, cinnamon and allspice is a common one in Anglo-American pudding cookery of the period, and the half lemon does the same job acid does in candy work: it keeps a heavy syrup from going grainy in the pan.