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Orange Sauce
Mix one teaspoonful corn starch with two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Squeeze the juice from three oranges and heat it.
When sufficiently hot add corn starch and sugar and cook till clear.
A three-ingredient pudding sauce that lives or dies on how the starch is handled. The original assumes you will add the dry cornstarch-sugar mixture to hot juice, which is where it goes wrong.
- Slurry firstCornstarch stirred straight into hot liquid can seize into lumps; mixing it with the sugar first, as the original does, helps it disperse. For more certainty, whisk the teaspoon of cornstarch and two tablespoons of sugar with a spoonful of the cold juice into a smooth paste, then stir that into the heated remainder.
- Yield and quantityThree oranges give roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of juice, and the recipe makes about that much sauce -- enough for four to six servings over a steamed or baked pudding.
- Starch ratioOne teaspoon of cornstarch per cup of juice gives a very light sauce, barely more than lightly thickened juice. For more body, use two or three teaspoons.
- "Cook till clear"This is the hinge. Cornstarch looks milky and tastes chalky until it reaches a full boil; bring it up while stirring and hold it about a minute, until the sauce turns glossy and translucent.
- Do not overcookPast a minute or two of boiling, cornstarch begins to break down and the sauce thins again. Acidic juice accelerates this, so pull it off the heat as soon as it clears.
- Strain the juicePulp and membrane cloud the finished sauce and stop it from ever looking clear. Strain through a fine sieve before heating.
- SweetnessTaste before serving: two tablespoons of sugar to roughly a cup of juice may be more than you want depending on the oranges, so cut it back if it cloys.
- ServingServe warm. At this proportion of starch it thickens only slightly as it cools; a brief rewarming and a whisk will loosen it if needed.
Cornstarch-thickened fruit sauces were a staple of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookery, and puddings of the era -- steamed, baked, or boiled in a cloth -- were rarely sent to the table unsauced. Before cornstarch became a household staple in the second half of the 1800s, such sauces are generally said to have been thickened with arrowroot, flour, or egg yolk; the refined corn starch sold in boxes gave a clearer, more neutral result that let the fruit colour show. A sauce of this kind could be assembled in five minutes from a handful of oranges, dressing up a plain pudding without recourse to cream or wine.