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Molasses Sauce
1 cup molasses 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons lemon juice or 1 tablespoon vinegar Boil molasses and butter five minutes; remove from fire and add lemon juice.
Cream Sauce I 3/4 cup thick cream ½ cup powdered sugar 1/4 cup milk ½ teaspoon vanilla Mix cream and milk, beat until stiff, using egg-beater; add sugar and vanilla.
Two sauces have run together in this transcription, and the head of the first one is missing. Read them as separate recipes and fill the gaps before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe molasses and butter amounts were part of the ingredient list that dropped out; only the lemon juice or vinegar line survives. The original text on this page does not give them, so treat any figure you use as a reconstruction.
- Where one recipe endsEverything from "Cream Sauce I" onward is a second, unrelated sauce. The lemon juice belongs to the molasses sauce; the vanilla belongs to the cream.
- Boiling the molassesFive minutes at a full boil concentrates it noticeably and it will thicken on cooling. Use a wide pan, watch for the foam climbing, and pull it early if you want a sauce that stays pourable over a hot pudding.
- Why the acid goes in off the heatLemon juice or vinegar added after the pan leaves the fire keeps its brightness and cuts the flat sweetness; boiled in, much of that fresh flavour is driven off.
- Molasses itselfPeriod molasses was probably closer to what is now sold as full-flavor or robust than to blackstrap or to light table syrup. Blackstrap will make the sauce bitter after five minutes of concentration.
- Thick creamThis meant cream skimmed to somewhere above 30 percent fat. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent whips faster and stiffer, so the quarter cup of milk that thins it is worth keeping.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this often meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than today's cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. A cup and a half to three quarters of a cup of cream is very sweet by current taste; half that is enough for most puddings.
- YieldThe cream sauce makes about two cups whipped, enough to dress six to eight servings of a steamed or baked pudding. No yield can be given for the molasses sauce, since its quantities are missing.
Molasses was the working household's sweetener in New England long before granulated sugar became cheap, arriving by the barrel through the West Indies trade and turning up in everything from brown bread to Indian pudding to this sauce. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book collects a whole battery of pudding sauces in this section, from hard sauce and foamy sauce to cream and molasses, because the hot puddings they accompanied were plain by design: a steamed batter or a baked cornmeal dish carried its interest in the sauce poured over it.