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Diplomatic Sauce for Pudding
Boil one-half pound of sugar in boiling water, then thicken it with flour. Let the sauce simmer until clear, then mix with it some red fruit juice or white or red wine, a little pounded mace, and the juice of half a lemon.
A cornstarch-style dessert sauce from the Waldorf's pastry side, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no water quantity, no wine quantity, no yield. The proportions are yours to set, but the method is fixed.
- The sugarHalf a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. Dissolve it in roughly 1 1/2 cups of water — the original gives no volume, and the sauce is meant to be thin enough to pour over a steamed or boiled pudding.
- Thickening with flourNever scatter dry flour into boiling syrup. Whisk 2 to 3 tablespoons of flour into a few tablespoons of cold water or wine first, then stream that slurry in. Cornstarch at half the quantity gives a cleaner result and clears faster.
- "Simmer until clear" is the hingeA flour-thickened sauce looks cloudy and tastes raw until the starch has cooked out — usually three to five minutes at a bare simmer, with steady stirring. Pull it early and the sauce is pasty; that visual cue is the whole test.
- Add the wine off the heatAdd the wine last -- The recipe does say to mix the wine or fruit juice in after the sauce has cleared, and the order matters. Prolonged boiling drives off the aromatics and, with red wine, dulls the color; adding it off the heat and warming it through only is the safer modern reading. Figure 1/2 to 3/4 cup.
- Pounded maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold whole as "blades" in 1896 and ground in most shops now. Use about 1/4 teaspoon ground; if you have blades, grind them fresh, as mace loses its warmth quickly.
- Red fruit juiceCurrant, raspberry or cherry are the likely candidates, the sort of juice a kitchen might have bottled from the summer's preserving. Any unsweetened tart red juice works; sweetened commercial juice will push an already sugary sauce over.
- Yield and servingWith the quantities suggested above, this makes something over 2 1/2 cups. Serve warm, and thin with a little more wine or water if it tightens as it stands.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, but his 1896 compilation preserves the house repertoire, and this is a standard hotel pudding sauce dressed up with a grand name. "Diplomate" was one of the nineteenth-century French kitchen's prestige labels, attached in its dessert sense to dishes finished with wine, liqueur or candied fruit — pudding diplomate — and it signaled luxury more than any fixed formula. The technique underneath is much older and plainer: sugar syrup bound with flour, sharpened with lemon and spiced with mace, a sauce with a long prior history in English and American cookbooks. Mace here is the tell of an older palate; it is generally said to have been the standard sweet spice for wine sauces and possets before vanilla became the default in American dessert cookery.