Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Caramel Sauce
Caramel Sauce
Place a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of water in a pan, and stir until the resulting syrup is of a clear brown tint, but not so dark as when making caramel; then add a coffeecup of boiling water, and stir until the whole is well blended. Now add one tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in a little cold water, and boil for a full minute, stirring all the time. Next add a tablespoon of butter, and when this is melted the sauce is done. Add one teaspoon of vanilla. Serve with blanc mange or custard.
A working caramel sauce thickened with cornstarch rather than cream, which is why it stays glossy and pourable when cold. Two details in the original need translation.
- "A coffeecup"Period American books are inconsistent, but a coffeecup is usually reckoned at about a cup, against a teacup of roughly three-quarters of a cup. Use about 8 fl oz of boiling water; much more will simply thin the sauce.
- "Not so dark as when making caramel"In this period "caramel" often meant the near-black burnt sugar kept as a colouring for soups and gravies, which is probably the contrast intended here. Stop at a clear amber-brown, the colour of strong tea, and pull the pan off the heat at once because residual heat keeps the sugar darkening.
- Sugar and one tablespoon of waterThat much water only damps the sugar; this is effectively a dry caramel and it will melt unevenly. Swirl the pan rather than stirring hard once the sugar begins to liquefy, and brush any crystals off the sides with a wet pastry brush.
- Adding the boiling waterMolten sugar is well above 300F and the water will erupt into steam. Add it in a slow stream with the pan at arm's length, and use a deep saucepan rather than a shallow one. The caramel will seize into lumps; keep it over low heat and stir until they dissolve.
- The cornstarchSlake it in about two tablespoons of cold water and stir the slurry into the simmering sauce. The full minute of boiling is not padding: undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and the sauce will thin again as it stands.
- Butter and vanillaAdd both off the heat. Boiling after the butter goes in can break the emulsion, and vanilla extract loses some of its aroma in a boiling liquid.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly a cup and a half, enough for six servings. It thickens considerably as it cools; if it sets too stiff for pouring, warm it gently with a spoonful of water.
Caramel sauce belongs to the late nineteenth-century American dessert repertoire in which a plain moulded pudding was made interesting by what was poured over it. Blanc mange and boiled custard, its two suggested partners, are pale, mild and inexpensive, and a sauce carried the flavour. The thickening with cornstarch rather than cream is characteristic of the period's household economy, cornstarch having been commercially manufactured and widely marketed as a pantry staple from the 1840s and 1850s onward. The recipe's aside that the syrup should be lighter than "when making caramel" is a reminder that caramel then often meant burnt sugar colouring, a bottled or homemade browning agent kept for gravies and soups, rather than the confection the word now suggests.