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Lemon Sauce
1/4 Cup Sugar 1/4 Cup Light Corn Syrup 1 Cup Boiling Water 1 Tablespoon Cornstarch 1 Tablespoon Butter Substitute 1/8 Teaspoon Salt 2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice Grated Rind of Lemon Teaspoon Nutmeg Mix sugar, salt, and cornstarch. Add water gradually, stirring constantly.
Add the corn syrup. Boil for a few minutes. Remove from fire, add butter substitute, nutmeg, lemon juice and grated rind. (Makes 1/2 cups of sauce-about 6 servings.)
A cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce of the plainest sort, notable mainly for what it reveals about the pantry it came from. Two of its measurements need interpretation before you start.
- Butter substituteThis means margarine or oleomargarine, called for by name in periods when butter was rationed or expensive. Butter works identically here and tastes better; one tablespoon is a tablespoon either way.
- The nutmeg is almost certainly a misprintThe nutmeg quantity looks garbled -- the line reads simply "Teaspoon Nutmeg" with no figure in front of it, so a fraction has probably dropped out in setting. Taken as a full teaspoon it would bury the lemon in a cup and a half of sauce; a small fraction of a teaspoon is the safer reading.
- Yield"1/2 cups" reads as a typesetting slip for 1 1/2 cups, which is roughly what a cup of water plus the sugar, syrup and juice would give. Six servings then works out at about four tablespoons over each portion of pudding.
- "Boil for a few minutes"Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil to thicken and to cook out its raw, chalky taste, but past two or three minutes of hard boiling the starch begins to break down and the sauce thins again. Stop when it turns from cloudy to translucent and coats the spoon.
- Why the corn syrupIt interferes with sucrose crystallizing, so the sauce is less likely to go grainy as it cools, and it may also have been serving to stretch the sugar. Replacing all of it with granulated sugar gives a slightly less glossy, less stable sauce.
- Juice and zest go in off the heatAs written, and for good reason: boiling acid weakens cornstarch's thickening power, and the volatile oils in the zest cook off fast. Add both after the pan leaves the burner.
- ServingMeant warm, poured over steamed or baked puddings, gingerbread, cottage pudding or plain cake. It thickens considerably on standing; loosen with a spoonful of hot water rather than reboiling.
Lemon sauce is a workhorse of the American pudding chapter, a standard warm accompaniment to cottage pudding, gingerbread and steamed batter puddings, and it survives in community cookbooks long after the puddings themselves went out of fashion. The tell here is the ingredient list: light corn syrup standing in for part of the sugar and "butter substitute" written in place of butter suggest a household economizing at a time when sugar and butter were rationed or simply dear and corn syrup and margarine were the promoted alternatives.