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Lemon Sauce II
1/2 cup sugar 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup boiling water 1½ tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon corn-starch or Few gratings nutmeg 1½ tablespoons flour Few grains salt Mix sugar and corn-starch, add water gradually, stirring constantly; boil five minutes, remove from fire, add butter, lemon juice, and nutmeg.
A straightforward cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the sort Fannie Farmer's book gives half a dozen versions of, meant to be spooned hot over steamed and baked puddings. The typesetting has run two recipes together; read the last line as the start of the next one.
- The stray last line"1/3 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, Yolks 3 eggs" belongs to the following recipe in the book, not to this one. Ignore it here: this sauce contains no egg.
- Cornstarch or flourThe ingredient column offers 1 tablespoon corn-starch or 1½ tablespoons flour. Cornstarch gives a clear, glossy sauce; flour gives a slightly cloudy, softer-set one. Use one or the other, not both.
- Add the water graduallyThis is the hinge. Sugar and starch must be dry-mixed first and the boiling water worked in a little at a time with constant stirring, or the starch seizes into lumps that will not whisk out.
- Five minutes of boilingLonger than modern habit. The book gives five minutes for either thickener and no reason for it; the time suits flour, which wants longer cooking to lose its raw taste, while cornstarch generally needs less, and long hard boiling can thin a cornstarch sauce as the starch breaks down.
- Butter and juice go in off the heatBoth are added after the pan leaves the burner, as the recipe directs. The usual reasons given for this are that boiling dulls lemon juice and that butter stirred in at the end lends gloss and body; the book itself offers no explanation.
- Nutmeg"Few gratings" means from a whole nutmeg on a fine grater, roughly an eighth of a teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and stale quickly; use less if that is what you have.
- Yield and servingThe quantities given make appreciably more than a cup of sauce. Serve hot over plain steamed, boiled or baked puddings or gingerbread; it will thicken as it stands and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Lemon sauce belongs to the family of thickened sweet sauces that made plain boiled and steamed puddings palatable, and Farmer prints several graded by richness, from this cheap starch-and-water version up to ones built on creamed butter and egg yolks. The technique is the sweet cousin of a white sauce, and starch thickening was taught in cooking-school texts as a single lesson applied across gravies, cream soups and dessert sauces alike. Cornstarch was a widely available and inexpensive pantry staple in American kitchens by the late nineteenth century, which is why a recipe of this date can offer it alongside wheat flour. Nutmeg with lemon is an older English pairing that carried into the New England pudding repertoire.