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Lemon Sauce
½ cup sugar
1 tablespoon corn-starch
Nutmeg
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons lemon-juice
1 cup boiling water
Mix the sugar and corn-starch, add the boiling water and a pinch hot of salt and boil until thick and clear. Continue cooking over water for twenty minutes. Beat in the butter, the lemon-juice and nutmeg. A grating of lemon-rind may be added.
A straightforward cornstarch-thickened dessert sauce; the only thing that trips people up is the double-boiler stage and the order in which the butter and juice go in.
- "Cooking over water"The twenty-minute finish is done in a double boiler, or a bowl set over barely simmering water. Held gently it cooks out the raw starch taste; the sauce has already thickened by this point and should not be brought back to a hard boil.
- Add the acid last, off direct heatLemon juice added while the starch is still boiling will thin the sauce, since acid breaks down cornstarch's thickening power. Beating it in at the end, as written, is the hinge of the recipe.
- Butter off the heatWhisk the butter in a piece at a time once the pan is off the burner. It emulsifies into the starch gel and gives the gloss; boiling after it goes in can make the sauce look greasy.
- NutmegNo quantity is given, so grate it to taste. About an eighth of a teaspoon suits this volume. Pre-ground nutmeg is flatter than freshly grated.
- "A pinch hot of salt"A typesetting jumble for "a pinch of salt," added with the boiling water. Roughly an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Lemon rindIf you use the optional rind, grate only the yellow zest and add it with the juice at the end, so the heat does not drive off the oils.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough for four to six servings over cottage pudding, steamed puddings, gingerbread or baked apple dumplings. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
Lemon sauce belongs to a family of hot, translucent starch sauces that anchored the American pudding chapter for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a plain steamed or baked pudding was expected to arrive under something sweet and pourable. Cornstarch made these sauces cheap and reliable: commercially manufactured in the United States from the mid-1800s, it gave a clear, glossy set that flour could not, and it let a cook produce a respectable sauce from sugar, water and a lemon without eggs or cream. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household compendiums of exactly this practical stripe, and the sauce chapter here reflects a kitchen where the pudding was the point and the sauce was the small flourish that dressed it up.