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Molasses Sauce
Boil one cup of molasses with one and one-half tablespoons of butter for about five minutes. Remove from the fire and stir in slowly one tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar. This sauce is well adapted for serving with Brown Betty or Boiled or Baked Indian Pudding.
A three-ingredient dessert sauce that comes together in about five minutes; the only real variables are the molasses you choose and how far you let it boil.
- Which molassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm a pudding.
- Five minutes is a candy stageFive minutes is a long boil -- A cup of molasses at a full boil for five minutes concentrates noticeably and can thicken considerably as it cools. Boil at a steady bubble rather than hard, and judge by eye; it thickens further off the heat.
- Boil-overMolasses foams up dramatically. Use a saucepan at least three times the volume of the syrup and keep a spoon in hand.
- The acid goes in off the heatLemon juice or vinegar added to boiling syrup spatters and steams. Removing the pan first, as directed, is the instruction that matters; the acid cuts the flatness of cooked molasses.
- Butter measureOne and one-half tablespoons is about 20 g. Add it at the start with the molasses as written, or whisk it in at the end for a glossier sauce.
- Indian pudding"Indian meal" in this book is cornmeal; Indian pudding is the slow-baked cornmeal and molasses pudding this sauce was built to accompany. Brown Betty is the apple and breadcrumb pudding.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly three-quarters of a cup. Serve warm; refrigerated, it stiffens and needs gentle reheating, with a spoonful of water if necessary.
Molasses was long an everyday sweetener of American kitchens, at one time cheaper than refined sugar and shipped in quantity from cane refining, and its presence here marks a cookbook still rooted in nineteenth-century New England habits even as it was published for a national pattern-company audience. The dishes the sauce is prescribed for say the same thing: Indian pudding and Brown Betty are both thrifty, filling puddings built from cornmeal or stale bread rather than eggs and cream. The lemon juice or vinegar at the end is the practical touch, since cooked molasses on its own reads heavy and slightly cloying, and a little acid sharpens it enough to carry a plain pudding. The book is generally understood to have come out of Butterick's dress-pattern business, though its exact date and place among the company's domestic guides is less certain than often stated.