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Sauce for Pudding
Half cup of butter, one cup of sugar beaten to a cream; one egg, the juice and grated rind of one lemon, three tablespoonfuls of boiling water stirred in separately. Set in top of the tea kettle and steam until cooked.
A creamed lemon sauce set over steam — essentially a lemon curd loosened with butter, meant to be spooned hot over a steamed or baked pudding. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- "Top of the tea kettle"The sauce is set in a bowl or basin over the mouth of the kettle, an improvised double boiler; how well it sat would have depended on the kettle. Use a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water, with the base clear of the water.
- Never let it boilThis is one egg thickening a cup of sugar and a half cup of butter in the presence of lemon juice. Direct heat or a hard boil will scramble it. Stir constantly and pull it off at around 170F, when it coats the back of a spoon.
- "Stirred in separately""Stirred in separately" most likely means adding the egg, then the lemon, then the boiling water one at a time and beating between each, rather than tipping them in together.
- The lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith underneath is bitter. Grate it into the sugar before creaming if you want a stronger perfume, since the sugar crystals pull the oil out of the peel.
- ButterTake it to a properly soft room temperature before creaming. Butter of the period was often salted for keeping, so a lightly salted butter suits the sauce.
- TimingNo time is given because it depends on the vessel. Expect 8 to 12 minutes of steady stirring over simmering water.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly a cup and a half, enough for six to eight servings of pudding. Serve hot; it thickens considerably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
- If it splitsA sauce that curdles at the edges can usually be rescued by pulling it off the heat immediately and whisking hard, or by pressing it through a fine sieve.
Puddings in Anglo-American cookery were rarely served naked, and a great many nineteenth-century books carry a whole subsection of sauces to go over them — hard sauce, foamy sauce, wine sauce, and lemon sauces like this one. Lemon was the standard brightener for the heavy steamed and suet puddings of the period, cutting richness in the way a fruit compote might now. A kettle kept hot on the range was a normal fixture of the period kitchen, which is why the instruction to steam the sauce in the kettle's mouth needed no further explanation. The technique is simply a lemon curd by another route, and the sauce keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator.