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Ginger Sauce
Bruise one or two pieces of whole ginger; put them in a saucepan with three ounces of loaf sugar and one pint of water and boil for several minutes; then skim and strain the liquor. Mix a tablespoonful of arrowroot smoothly with a little cold water, stir in the above liquor, return it to the stewpan, and stir over the fire until thickened and boiling. It is then ready to be served.
A clear, ginger-scented dessert sauce thickened with arrowroot — the sort of thing spooned over steamed pudding. It comes together in ten minutes and the only real skill is in the thickening.
- The hinge: arrowrootArrowroot thickens the moment it reaches a boil and then begins to thin again if held there. Bring it just to the boil, stir until it turns from cloudy to glossy and translucent, and take it off the heat immediately. Prolonged boiling or vigorous whisking will break it down to a watery sauce.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, chipped off as needed. Three ounces of ordinary granulated sugar (about 6 tablespoons) is the equivalent; it was prized for purity, not for any different flavour.
- Whole ginger"Pieces of whole ginger" most likely means unground dried ginger root rather than fresh — a hard, pale, knobbed piece from a spice merchant — though the recipe does not say. Bruise it with the flat of a knife or a mallet to crack the fibres open. Two pieces gives a pronounced heat; one is mild. Dried ginger tends to be drier and more peppery than fresh, so fresh root is not an exact substitute, though about 2 inches of it, sliced, will do.
- "Boil for several minutes"Five to eight minutes of gentle boiling is enough to draw out the ginger; longer only reduces the pint of water and concentrates the sugar. Taste the strained liquor before thickening and adjust the sugar then.
- Saucepan and stewpanThe recipe names two vessels but one will do; a stewpan in this period is simply a straight-sided saucepan. Use something non-reactive.
- SkimmingThe scum is dissolved impurities from the sugar and fine particles from the ginger. Modern sugar throws almost none, so there may be nothing to skim — strain through a fine sieve and move on.
- YieldAbout a pint, enough for eight servings over pudding, and best made shortly before serving. Arrowroot sauces weep and thin on standing and do not reheat gracefully.
Ginger sauce belongs to the long English tradition of sweet thickened sauces served with boiled and steamed puddings, and Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection carries a good many of these inherited British recipes alongside the à la carte cookery that made the Waldorf famous. The choice of arrowroot rather than flour is deliberate and characteristic of nineteenth-century invalid and dessert cookery: arrowroot, imported from the West Indies, sets to a clear gloss instead of an opaque paste, so the sauce keeps the pale amber of the ginger liquor. Dried ginger root itself had been a staple of the European spice trade since the Middle Ages, and by the 1890s it was cheap and unremarkable — a store-cupboard item rather than a luxury, which is why the recipe assumes the reader has some at hand and specifies nothing about where it came from.