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Vanilla Sauce
Make same as Lemon Sauce II, using one teaspoon vanilla in place of lemon juice and nutmeg.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on its parent recipe, so the first job is locating Lemon Sauce II in the same chapter and reading it through before starting.
- The parent recipeEverything here depends on Lemon Sauce II, which the present recipe tells us only contains lemon juice and nutmeg. Read the parent version your edition prints, and note whether it contains egg, since that governs how much heat the sauce will take.
- Two omissions, not oneYou are removing both the lemon juice and the nutmeg, which is most of the parent sauce's flavour. One teaspoon of vanilla is doing all the work, so use a good extract and taste before serving.
- Add the vanilla lastVanilla is volatile and alcohol-based. Stir it in off the heat, after the sauce has finished thickening, or much of the aroma cooks away.
- Do not let it boilIf the version you follow contains egg, keep the sauce over hot rather than boiling water and stop as soon as it coats a spoon. A creamed butter-and-egg sauce curdles and separates well below a simmer.
- ConsistencyPudding sauces of this kind are generally served pourable rather than thin; if yours needs loosening, a spoonful of boiling water will do it without diluting the flavouring.
- Yield and servingThe quantity depends entirely on the parent recipe, so check its measurements. Serve it hot; it stiffens as it cools and will need gentle rewarming over water, never direct heat.
The book is organised so that a handful of base sauces spawn a page of variations, and this entry is that method at its most economical: change one flavouring and the sauce gets a new name. The abundance of hot pudding sauces in an American cookbook of this period reflects how much of the dessert course was steamed, boiled or baked batter puddings, which are dry on their own and were expected to arrive under something sweet and warm. Vanilla itself had only recently become an everyday pantry item for middle-class cooks: commercial extracts, made by macerating cured pods in alcohol, were widely sold by the late nineteenth century and were cheap enough to use by the teaspoon, where a generation earlier a household might have kept a single bean buried in the sugar jar. The book also pairs nutmeg with lemon elsewhere, a seasoning dropped here.