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Lemon Sauce III
1/3 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. Yolks 3 eggs. 1/3 cup boiling water 3 tablespoons lemon juice Few gratings lemon rind Cream butter, add sugar gradually, and yolks of eggs, slightly beaten; then add water, and cook over boiling water until mixture thickens. Remove from range, add lemon juice and rind. Serve with Apple Pudding or Popovers.
This is the third of several lemon sauces in the book, and the version whose ingredient column has come down to us incomplete. What survives is the method, which is a straightforward egg-yolk custard sauce sharpened with lemon.
- The ingredient list is truncatedOnly the water, lemon juice and rind carry quantities; the butter, sugar and yolks called for in the method have been lost from the printed list. The original amounts are unknown.
- "Cook over boiling water"This means a double boiler, not direct heat. Set a bowl over a pan of simmering water and keep the water below the bowl's base; the sauce is a custard and will scramble on the bottom of a pan set on the burner.
- The hinge: temperature, not timeStir constantly and take it off as soon as it coats the spoon, somewhere around 170F. Yolk-thickened sauces will curdle if pushed much hotter, and this one is thickened by egg alone.
- Lemon juice goes in last for a reasonLemon juice goes in last -- Farmer removes the pan from the range before the juice and rind go in. Adding acid off the heat is generally reckoned to reduce the risk of the yolks seizing, though the reasoning here is ours, not hers.
- "Range"The kitchen range of the period, wood or coal, though gas ranges were coming into use. Read it as the stovetop.
- Grated rindTake the zest before juicing, and only the yellow. Modern lemons are usually waxed, so scrub them first.
- Yield and servingServing -- serve it warm and pourable; it thickens further as it cools and will not reheat over direct heat without splitting. The yield cannot be worked out, since the butter, sugar and egg quantities are missing from the printed list.
Hot puddings in the Boston Cooking-School tradition were commonly sent to table under a sauce, and Fannie Farmer's book gives whole ranks of them, numbered rather than named -- Lemon Sauce I, II, III -- so that a cook could pick the consistency and richness that suited the pudding. The plainer versions are starch-thickened and cost almost nothing; this one, thickened with butter and egg yolks, is the richer end of the range and is closer to a warm lemon curd. The suggestion to serve it with popovers shows that popovers could appear as a sweet course as readily as a bread.