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Pudding Sauces (Lemon Sauce 1 teaspoons butter)
3/4 cups sugar. 1/4 cup water. Lemon Sauce I 2 teaspoons butter 1 tablespoon lemon juice C Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water five minutes; remove from fire; add butter and lemon juice.
The text as printed here is defective — the ingredient list has been mangled in transcription, and the quantities of sugar and water are missing altogether. What survives is a standard boiled-syrup lemon sauce, and the method is intact enough to work from.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "2 teaspoons butter" and "1 tablespoon lemon juice" survive intact; the stray "C" may be the remains of a line for cup measures. The figures for this version are simply not recoverable from the page.
- Five minutes means five minutesFive minutes' boiling concentrates the syrup; how far depends on the proportions, which are missing here. Boiled much longer it will be stiff and sticky as it cools; boiled less it stays watery.
- Butter and juice off the heatThe instruction to remove from the fire before adding them is the hinge of the recipe. Lemon juice boiled in a hot syrup loses its brightness, and butter whisked into a boiling syrup separates rather than emulsifying.
- Lemon juiceBottled juice will read flat here because there is nothing else in the sauce to hide behind. Use fresh, and strain out the pips.
- Grating the rindMany contemporary versions of this sauce add the grated yellow rind of the lemon with the juice. Most of a lemon's aroma is in the peel oil, not the juice, and the sauce is noticeably thin without it.
- ServingIt is meant hot, poured over cottage pudding, steamed batter puddings or gingerbread; it thickens as it cools and can be rewarmed gently. Yield cannot be given, since the sugar and water quantities are missing.
- Thickened variantsThe Roman numeral in the title indicates that at least one other lemon sauce follows in the book. Sauces in this family are often thickened with cornstarch or built on an egg base; this one, as printed, is neither.
Hot puddings in American cookbooks of this period were mostly plain — cottage pudding, steamed batter pudding, bread pudding — and the sauce was where the flavor and the expense went, which is why a cookbook of this kind groups a whole battery of them together under a running head of "Pudding Sauces" and numbers the variants. A boiled sugar syrup finished off the heat with butter and an acid is one of the oldest and cheapest of these: it needs no eggs, no cream, and no long cooking. The numbering itself was common across many American cookbooks of the period, so a cook who knew Lemon Sauce I could work through the thickened and egg-based versions that followed.