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Sauce for Ice Cream (II)
2 Tablespoons Butter 1/2 Cup Honey 2 Teaspoons Cornstarch Cook together the cornstarch and butter thoroughly, being careful not to brown them. Add the honey and cook the mixture until it becomes hard when dropped into cold water and until all taste of raw cornstarch has been removed.
A three-ingredient hot honey sauce that sets to a chewy shell when it hits cold ice cream. The whole thing takes under ten minutes and can scorch in the last one.
- The hinge: cook the starch, don't color itButter and cornstarch go into the pan together over low heat and are stirred until the paste is smooth and no longer smells chalky. The recipe explicitly says not to brown them, and an undercooked paste leaves the raw-starch taste the recipe warns against.
- Pan and heatUse the smallest heavy saucepan you own. Half a cup of honey in a wide pan reduces and burns before you can test it, and honey scorches at a lower temperature than sugar syrup. Keep the heat at medium-low and stir constantly.
- What the cold-water test means hereHoney dropped into cold water that goes firm rather than spreading is broadly the hard-ball range, about 250-265F, though the recipe's "hard" is not precise enough to pin to one stage. In practice the sauce is ready when a drop gathers into a chewy pellet you can lift out on a spoon.
- It is meant to setPoured warm over ice cream it firms into a taffy-like layer within seconds, which is the point. If you want it to stay pourable, stop the cooking a stage earlier, when a drop in cold water forms a soft, flattening ball.
- Choose the honeyThe book does not say which honey to use. A mild honey leaves the ice cream recognisable; a strong one such as buckwheat or chestnut will dominate it.
- Yield and servingAbout half a cup after cooking, enough for four small servings. Serve straight from the pan while hot.
- LeftoversIt sets solid on cooling. Reheat gently with a spoonful of cream or hot water and stir until smooth.
Honey sauces like this one belong to a period when American home cooks were being courted as a market for honey. Beekeepers' associations and honey packers circulated recipe leaflets in the early twentieth century promoting honey as a substitute for refined sugar, and such recipes migrated into general household books. Cornstarch, commercially available in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century onward, was a cheap and familiar thickener, and the cold-water test that closes the recipe is standard confectioner's practice of the era, used long before household thermometers were common. That this is the second "Sauce for Ice Cream" in the book reflects how routine a dessert ice cream had become once hand-cranked freezers were widespread.