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Wine Sauce (Three-quarters pint water one)
Three-quarters pint water, one cup sugar, one small teaspoon corn starch, one teaspoonful of extract lemon and cinnamon, one-half gill of wine. Boil water, add corn starch, dissolved, and the sugar; boil fifteen minutes, strain; when about to serve, add extracts and wine.
A thin, clear pouring sauce for steamed and boiled puddings — closer to a sweet syrup than to a custard. Two details in the original are worth adjusting before you start.
- The measurements in modern termsThree-quarters of a pint is 1 1/2 cups (about 355 ml). A gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 2 fl oz — 4 tablespoons, or 1/4 cup — of wine. One cup sugar and one small teaspoon cornstarch are as written.
- Do not boil it fifteen minutesConsider not boiling it fifteen minutes -- long boiling tends to weaken a cornstarch gel, so a sauce cooked that long may thin back out rather than set. Bring it to a boil, then simmer one to two minutes after it clears and thickens. If the fifteen minutes was intended to reduce the syrup, you can get the same effect by starting with slightly less water.
- Slurry, then strain"Dissolved" here most likely means slaked in a spoonful of cold water first; cornstarch dropped dry into boiling water seizes into lumps. Whatever the original intent of the straining step, it is still worth doing to catch any lumps.
- One teaspoonful, two extractsThe phrasing is ambiguous — most likely a teaspoon divided between lemon and cinnamon, not a teaspoon of each. Start with half a teaspoon lemon extract and a quarter-teaspoon of cinnamon flavouring, and taste.
- Wine and extracts go in off the heatThis is the hinge of the recipe. Both are volatile; added to boiling syrup they cook away and leave a flat sweetness. Pull the pan off the burner, stir them in, and serve.
- Which wineThe recipe says only "wine." A fortified wine such as sherry, madeira or a sweet port suits it; a dry table wine will read as sour against this much sugar.
- YieldRoughly two cups, less if you reduce it; enough to sauce a pudding for six to eight. It is meant to be served warm, and will thicken slightly as it cools.
Wine sauce is a common companion to the boiled and steamed puddings of the period, and American household manuals of the late nineteenth century often carry a version. Two families of the sauce existed side by side: a creamed butter-and-sugar "hard sauce" flavoured with spirits, and this thinner boiled kind thickened with cornstarch or arrowroot, which was cheaper and stretched further. The cornstarch itself marks the date: commercially refined corn starch became a common American pantry item from the mid-1800s onward, and cookbooks of this period lean on it heavily as a thickener where an earlier writer would have specified flour or egg. That a cookbook of this kind includes wine in a dessert sauce is a reminder that the temperance sentiment of the era was uneven — some books of the period also offer a wineless version, flavoured with vanilla and lemon alone.