Home › Honey, Ices and Gelatines › Honey Sauce (Boil scant cup of honey cup)
Honey Sauce (Boil scant cup of honey cup)
Boil 1 scant cup of honey, 1/4 cup of water, 1 tablespoon of butter, a saltspoon of salt, a saltspoon of cinnamon, a little nutmeg and the juice of one lemon (or 2 tablespoons of vinegar) together for fifteen minutes. Nice with apple dumplings or boiled rice.
A four-minute sauce padded out to fifteen by an era that trusted a hard boil more than a thermometer. The only real decision is how far to let the syrup go.
- The hinge: watch the boilA scant cup of honey with only a quarter cup of water can reduce a long way in fifteen minutes at a full rolling boil, and honey darkens and turns bitter more readily than sugar syrup. A gentler simmer, pulled when it coats a spoon, is the safer reading of the instruction.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two of them here, one salt and one cinnamon, plus a few scrapes of nutmeg.
- Scant cupA cup filled just below the rim, so roughly 7 to 7.5 fl oz rather than a full 8. Precision does not matter much in a sauce of this kind.
- ButterThe tablespoon of butter is boiled in with the rest and gives the finished sauce gloss and richness.
- Lemon or vinegarThe recipe treats them as interchangeable: acid cuts the sweetness and helps keep the honey from crystallising.
- Yield and servingRoughly a cup, depending on how far it is reduced; enough for four to six servings. Serve warm rather than straight off the heat. It thickens on cooling and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Honey sauces belong to a long line of sweet sauces that predate cheap refined sugar, and they survived into American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where they often appear as accompaniments to plain boiled and steamed puddings, dumplings and rice. The pairing suggested here is the giveaway: apple dumplings and boiled rice were economical, bland, filling dishes, and a spiced sweet sauce was what made them worth eating. The spicing of cinnamon, nutmeg and a sharp note of lemon or vinegar is very old, a sweet-sour combination generally traced back through medieval European cookery, where acid and honey were routinely used together. Its place in a bride's cookbook is practical rather than sentimental: it is a sauce made from shelf staples, needs no cream or eggs, and turns whatever is left in the larder into a dessert.